Gary McKinnon

This is a shortened import from the Wikipedia article as it appeared 13 April 2021.

Gary McKinnon     (sys-admin, hacker)
Nationality	British
Interests	• UFO • free energy

Gary McKinnon is a Scottish systems administrator and hacker who was accused in 2002 of perpetrating 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. On 16 October 2012, after a series of legal proceedings in Britain, Home Secretary Theresa May blocked extradition to the United States.

Alleged crime

McKinnon was accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, at the house of his girlfriend's aunt in London, using the name 'Solo'.

US authorities stated he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the United States Army's Military District of Washington network of 2000 computers for 24 hours. McKinnon also posted a notice on the military's website: "Your security is crap". After the September 11 attacks in 2001, he allegedly deleted weapons logs at the Earle Naval Weapons Station, rendering its network of 300 computers inoperable and paralyzing munitions supply deliveries for the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet. McKinnon was also accused of copying data, account files and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities stated that the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was over $700,000.

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..."

US authorities stated that McKinnon was 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."

Arrest and legal proceedings

McKinnon was first interviewed by police on 19 March 2002. After this interview, his computer was seized by the authorities. 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 United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment contained seven counts of computer-related crime, each of which carried a potential ten-year jail sentence.

Extradition proceedings

McKinnon remained at liberty without restriction for three years until June 2005 (until after the UK enacted the Extradition Act 2003, which implemented the 2003 extradition treaty with the United States wherein the United States 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. If extradited to the U.S. and charged, McKinnon would have faced up to 70 years in jail. He had also expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.

British government blocks extradition

On 16 October 2012, after a decade of legal proceedings, the then-Home Secretary Theresa May announced to the House of Commons that the extradition had been blocked, saying that:

"Mr McKinnon is accused of serious crimes. But there is also no doubt that he is seriously ill [...] He has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness. 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."

She stated that the Director of Public Prosecutions would determine whether McKinnon should face trial before a British court. On 14 December, the DPP, Keir Starmer, announced that McKinnon would not be prosecuted in the United Kingdom, because of the difficulties involved in bringing a case against him when the evidence was in the United States.

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 states his motivation, drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on 9 May 2001 by "The Disclosure Project", was to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and the suppression of "free energy", all of which he states to have proven through his actions. In an interview televised on the BBC's Click TV programme, McKinnon stated 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 stated 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 stated 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.

Weblinks

• FOIA request with NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 13 April 2021.
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Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Keir Starmer is a Long-Time Servant of the British Security State	Article	2 March 2021	Oliver Eagleton	Keir Starmer is sometimes praised for being an outsider in the world of politics (or mocked as too lawyerly and insufficiently political). But in reality, much of his work as Director of Public Prosecutions blurred the boundaries between prosecutor and politician – following the dictates of the Cameron coalition, negotiating with foreign officials on its behalf, and dropping or pursuing cases according to its interests.

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