He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be". And so, for the next seven years, on and off, Gary sat in his girlfriend's aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mouse pad, and he snooped.
From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason. On those occasions, Gary's connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.
He sounds to me like a virtuoso hacker, although I am someone who can barely download RealPlayer. I nod blankly as he says things like, "You get on to easy networks, like Support and Logistics, in order to exploit the trust relationship that military departments have between each other, and once you get on to an easy thing, you find out what networks they trust and then you hop and hop and hop, and eventually you think, 'That looks a bit more secretive.
He's just an ordinary self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone. Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too? It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet.
Not good for the intellect. This was November By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, "which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn't have a job.
We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you've split up? It's bad. So while Tamsin was trying to get on with her new relationship, Gary was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He snooped around all the Forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, etc - reading internal court martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse.
At the Johnson Space Centre he spied on photographs of cigar-shaped objects that might have been UFOs but - he says - were probably satellites. I loved computer games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Gary McKinnon: This is a bit of a red herring. I have seen it but I wasn't inspired by it. The first edition that I read was too full of information It had to be banned, and it was reissued without the sensitive stuff in it.
McKinnon: I would have done it anyway because I used the internet to get useful information. The book just kick-started me. Hacking for me was just a means to an end. McKinnon: I knew that governments suppressed antigravity, UFO-related technologies, free energy or what they call zero-point energy. This should not be kept hidden from the public when pensioners can't pay their fuel bills. McKinnon: Certainly did. There is The Disclosure Project. This is a book with testimonials from everyone from air traffic controllers to those responsible for launching nuclear missiles.
Very credible witnesses. They talk about reverse- engineered technology taken from captured or destroyed alien craft. But should I have been all that surprised? NASA hacking stories are not so rare as we might like to think.
The subject of the hearing was a statement he authored, about the state of NASA cyber security. Because what he said was, really, quite remarkable. Two years, 5, malicious attacks. That averages to seven and a half hacks per day! Among thousands upon thousands of hackers, one has stood out from the rest. Using a simple dial-up modem, Solo began by scanning for open ports, such as —the port used to access Windows computers. Finally, onto the unsecured computers he found, Solo uploaded RemotelyAnywhere, a remote access tool.
Once inside, Solo could jump from computer to computer, center to center, with little resistance and few firewalls. Each time he accessed the network, he could see, through the software he was using, other users with IP addresses located around the world, from China to the Netherlands.
Definitely not NASA personnel. Ordinary employees can use RemotelyAnywhere to, say, access their work computers from home. Because of its legitimate uses, Solo was able to install the program onto NASA computers without any red flags being raised by any antivirus programs. By controlling a computer from a remote access point, Solo knew that everything he was doing would show up on a screen somewhere in the United States.
Even a janitor who walked by, sweeping the floors, posed a threat. Imagine being that janitor, working late at night in a dark open office, seeing a computer going about its business, with nobody in the chair controlling it!
Presumably, somebody would hear about it imminently. Knowing this, Solo timed his access to when he was least likely to be spotted. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels. His interest in it quickly grew into a fixation. I was into graphics and artificial intelligence.
And so, his path was borne. Gary left school at 17, and became a hairdresser. He failed to complete his university degree due to struggles with advanced mathematics, but soon managed to find work in IT services. From to , he found sporadic work in tech support for an ISP provider, a solicitations company, a telecommunications provider, and J.
By all accounts he was living a rather ordinary life in North London. But to the U. He was an unknown entity, attacking U. Classic mistake. When the police barged in at in the morning, Gary was fast asleep, as usual, after a long night of hacking. When Britain's hi-tech crime unit finally came for him in , Mr McKinnon was not surprised. He told the BBC: "I almost wanted to be caught, because it was ruining me.
I had this classic thing of wanting to be caught so there would be an end to it. He thought he would be tried in Britain, and that he might get, at the most, three to four years in prison. But the Gary McKinnon saga dragged on for 10 years and in that time there have been seven home secretaries.
One of his major arguments against extradition was that he believed he would not get a fair trial in the US and would be punished more severely because he had contested the extradition process.
The case had been in Theresa May's in-tray since she became Home Secretary in May and in October she finally ruled that he should not be extradited. She said there was no doubt Mr McKinnon was "seriously ill" and said: "Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights.
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