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Tuesday, July 20th, 2010tour | Posted by Editor - Blog News Service

Pentagon Hacker – Gary McKinnon

Pentagon Hacker - Gary McKinnon

Pentagon Hacker - Gary McKinnon

Gary McKinnon (born 10 February 1966) is a Glasgow-born systems administrator and hacker who has been accused of what one US prosecutor claims is the “biggest military computer hack of all time,” although McKinnon himself states that he was merely looking for evidence of free energy suppression and a cover-up of UFO activity and other technologies potentially useful to the public. After a series of legal proceedings in the UK, McKinnon is currently awaiting extradition to the United States.

Alleged crime

McKinnon is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, using the name ‘Solo’. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force.

The US authorities claim he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base’s network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinnon is also accused of copying data, account files and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities claim the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was $800,000.

McKinnon has denied causing any damage, arguing that, in his quest for UFO-related material, he accessed open, unsecured machines with no passwords and no firewalls and that he left countless notes pointing out their many security failings. He disputes the damage and the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offence.[citation needed] While not admitting that it constituted evidence of destruction, McKinnon did admit leaving a threat on one computer:

US foreign policy is akin to Government-sponsored terrorism these days … It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year … I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels …

Arrest and legal proceedings

McKinnon was first interviewed by police on 19 March 2002. After this interview, his computer was seized by the authorities.[4] He was interviewed again on 8 August 2002, this time by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU).

In November 2002, McKinnon was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.[5] The indictment contained seven counts of computer-related crime, each of which carried a potential ten-year jail sentence.

Computer misuse was not an extraditable offence at the time and carried a maximum sentence of six months[citation needed]. According to the House of Lords judgement, the crimes of which McKinnon was accused have equivalents under British law for which the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. McKinnon remained at liberty without restriction for three years until June 2005 (until after the UK brought in the Extradition Act 2003, which implemented the 2003 extradition treaty with the US wherein the US did not need to provide contestable evidence), when he became subject to bail conditions including a requirement to sign in at his local police station every evening and to remain at his home address at night. In addition, he was banned from using a computer with access to the Internet. There have been no more developments in respect of the charges relating to United Kingdom legislation but in late 2005 the United States began extradition proceedings.

If he is extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon faces up to 70 years in jail and has expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay. He continues to contest the extradition proceedings and believes that he should face trial in the UK, principally as he argues that the destruction allegations are fraudulent and that any alleged crimes were committed there and not in the United States.

US authorities deny this, however, and claim that McKinnon is trying to downplay his own actions. A senior military officer at the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph: “US policy is to fight these attacks as strongly as possible. As a result of Mr McKinnon’s actions, we suffered serious damage. This was not some harmless incident. He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and Nasa computers and left silly and anti-America messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems.”

Representing McKinnon in the House of Lords on 16 June 2008, barristers told the Law Lords that the prosecutors had said McKinnon faced a possible 8–10 years in jail per count if he contested the charges (there were seven counts) without any chance of repatriation, but only 37–46 months if he co-operated and went voluntarily to the US. US-style plea bargains are not a part of English jurisprudence (although it is standard practice to reduce the sentence by one-third for a defendant who pleads guilty)[11] and McKinnon’s lawyers contended that in effect this was intimidation to force McKinnon to waive his legal rights. McKinnon also claimed that he had been told that he could serve part of his sentence in the UK if he co-operated. He rejected the offer because the Americans would not guarantee these concessions.

Barristers said that the Law Lords could deny extradition if there was an abuse of process: “If the United States wish to use the processes of English courts to secure the extradition of an alleged offender, then they must play by our rules.” The House of Lords rejected this argument, with the lead judgement (of Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood) holding that extradition proceedings should “accommodate legal and cultural differences between the legal systems of the many foreign friendly states with whom the UK has entered into reciprocal extradition arrangements”. McKinnon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, but the request for an appeal was rejected.

On 23 January 2009, McKinnon won permission from the High Court to apply for a judicial review against his extradition. On 31 July 2009, the High Court announced that McKinnon had lost this appeal. Currently McKinnon’s legal team, solicitor Karen Todner and barrister Ben Cooper, have applied for a judicial review into the Home Secretary’s rejection of medical evidence, which stated that, when he could easily be tried in the UK, it is unnecessary, cruel and inhumane to inflict the further stress of ripping him from his homeland, his family and his medical support network.

In August 2008, Mckinnon was diagnosed by three of the world’s leading experts (Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor Jeremy Turk and Professor Thomas Bernie) as suffering from an autism spectrum disorder compounded with clinical depression.

McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, claimed that he was suicidal and that he would not survive a U.S. prison incarceration. She has received support from psychiatrist Professor Jeremy Turk of St George’s Hospital, London, who said that suicide was now an “almost certain inevitability”.[18] On 10 November 2009, Janis Sharp gave evidence before the Select Committee for Home Affairs of the UK Parliament. The Committee backed calls for the extradition to be halted because of McKinnon’s “precarious state of mental health” and called for a comprehensive review of the extradition treaty.

In May 2010, following the change of government after the general election, the new Home Secretary Theresa May agreed to an adjournment to delay a High Court decision on whether the extradition could go ahead to allow the new government time to review the case.

Support for McKinnon

In early November 2008, a total of 80 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for any custodial sentence imposed by an American court to be served in a prison in the UK. However, on 15 July many of them voted in Parliament against a review of the extradition treaty.

In mid-November the rock group Marillion announced that it was ready to participate in a benefit concert in support of Gary McKinnon’s struggle to avoid extradition to United States. Organiser of the planned event Ross Hemsworth, an English radio host. No date has been set yet. Many have now voiced their support including Sting, Trudie Styler, Julie Christie, David Gilmour, Graham Nash, Peter Gabriel, The Proclaimers, Bob Geldof, Chrissie Hynde, Boris Johnson (Mayor of London), Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross[citation needed], Terry Waite, Tony Benn, Chris Huhne, Lord Carlile, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party of England and Wales, the National Autistic Society, Liberty and many others. All of these propose that, at least, he should be tried in the UK. In August 2009, Scottish Newspaper The Herald reported that Scots entrepreneur Luke Heron would pay £100,000 towards McKinnon’s legal costs in the event he was extradited to the US.

In a further article in The Herald, Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr., a retired NASA Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent, voiced his support for Gary McKinnon. Gutheinz, who is also an American criminal defense attorney and former Member of the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments, said that he feared Gary McKinnon would not find justice in the USA, because “the American judicial system turns a blind eye towards the needs of the mentally ill”.

The British tabloid The Daily Mail has started a campaign to prevent Gary McKinnon’s extradition to the U.S.

Janis Sharp, McKinnon’s mother, stood as an Independent candidate in the 2010 General Election in Blackburn in protest against the sitting Labour MP Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary when the extradition treaty was agreed. She failed to unseat Straw, finishing last out of eight candidates with 0.38% of the vote.

Statements to the media

McKinnon has admitted in many public statements that he obtained unauthorised access to computer systems in the United States including those mentioned in the United States indictment. He claims his motivation, drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on 9 May 2001 by the “The Disclosure Project”, was to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and the suppression of “free energy”, all of which he claims to have proven through his actions.

In an interview televised on the BBC’s Click programme, McKinnon claimed that he was able to get into the military’s networks simply by using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords; in other words his report suggests that there were computers on these networks with the default passwords active.

In his interview with the BBC he also claimed of “The Disclosure Project” that “they are some very credible, relied-upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there’s anti-gravity, there’s free energy, and it’s extraterrestrial in origin and [they've] captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it.” He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert’s claim that at the Johnson Space Center’s Building 8, images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this, comparing the raw originals with the “processed” images. He claimed to have viewed a detailed image of “something not man-made” and “cigar shaped” floating above the northern hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted owing to the hour, he did not think of capturing the image because he was “bedazzled”, and therefore did not think of securing it with the screen capture function in the software at the point when his connection was interrupted. McKinnon stated the image was approximately 256 megabytes in size, yet that the craft’s details were still distinct in the greatly inferior 4-bit color and low resolution he had to reduce the viewing image to appear across his mere 56k modem connection (approximate transfer rate 5.4kbps).

The charge that he perpetrated “the biggest military hack of all time” is ridiculed by McKinnon who characterises himself as a “bumbling computer nerd” who undestructively accessed open, unsecured machines while under the influence of cannabis,[38] and that the destruction claims were manufactured by embarrassed US authorities after the fact, in order to meet the dollar amount required to seek an extradition, to make him a poster child and intimidate any snoopers, especially those interested in the alien technology subjects he believed the public had a moral right to know of.

At the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference in London on April 27, 2006, McKinnon appeared on the Hackers’ Panel. When asked how his exploits were first discovered, McKinnon answered that he had miscalculated the timezone — he was using remote-control software to operate a Windows computer while its user was sitting in front of it.

NASA documents

In 2006, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed to NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon. NASA’s documents consisted of printed news articles from the Slashdot website, but no other related documents. This is consistent with NASA employees browsing internet articles about Gary McKinnon; the records of such browsing activity are in the public domain.

The records have been uploaded to the internet for review, and can be downloaded from theblackvault.com.

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