- He did a few trial runs, 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."
-
- "Like where?" I ask.
-
- "The US Space Command," he says.
-
- "What was the most exciting thing you
saw?"
-
- "I found a list of officers' names," he says,
"under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. 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."
-
- "The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I
ask.
-
- "That's what this trickle of evidence has led me
to believe."
-
-
-
- The Nerd Who Saw Too Much
The Guardian - UK
7-15-5
-
- Terrified Gary McKinnon says his forays into secret
Pentagon
networks were never politically motivated.
-
- A computer geek faces 70 years in jail for hacking into
the top levels of US defence. He tells Jon Ronson how, hooked and stoned,
he landed himself in such hot water.
-
- In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the
movie WarGames. In the film, a geeky computer whiz-kid hacks into a secret
Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates World War III.
Sitting
in the cinema, the teenage McKinnon wondered if he, too, could be a hacker.
"Really," I say to him now, "WarGames should have put you
off hacking for life."
-
- "Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it
to actually come true."
-
- WarGames ends with the Pentagon officials telling the
young nerd how impressed they are with his technical acumen. He's probably
going to grow up to have a brilliant career at NASA or the Department of
Defence. This is an unlikely scenario for McKinnon. He faces 20 charges
in the US, including stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might
have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage
to a protected computer, and interfering with maritime navigation equipment
in New Jersey.
-
- Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow
Street Magistrates Court in London. He had, the US prosecutors said,
perpetrated
the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused
damage and impaired the integrity of information. The US military district
of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown
was $700,000 US." These hacking attacks occurred immediately after
September 11, 2001, they said.
-
- This is McKinnon's first interview. He called me out
of the blue last week, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking
on people's doors and running away. "Your son sounds like a
hacker,"
he said. Then he invited me to his home in Bounds Green, north
London.
-
- He is good-looking, funny, slightly camp, nerdy, a
chain-smoker
- and terrified. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control
my own legs," he says. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking
about jail and about being arse-f---ed. And, remember, according to them
I was making Washington inoperable 'immediately after September 11'.
-
- "I'm having all these visions of " McKinnon
puts on a redneck prisoner voice, "'What you doing attacking our
country,
boy? Pick up that soap.' Yeah, it is absolutely f---ing
terrifying."
-
- The sentence the US Justice Department is seeking -
should
McKinnon be extradited - is up to 70 years. What McKinnon was hunting for,
as he snooped around NASA, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of
a UFO cover-up.
-
- McKINNON was born in Glasgow in 1966. His parents
separated
when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather,
a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," McKinnon says,
"and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which
is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that
he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and
it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science-fiction reader. So, him
being my second father, I started reading science-fiction, too, and doing
everything he did."
-
- McKinnon read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein -
"the
golden age of science-fiction". When he was 15 he joined Bufora, the
British UFO Research Association, which describes itself as "a
nationwide
network of [about] 300 people who have a dedicated, non-cultist interest
in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma".
-
- Then he saw WarGames, and he thought: "Can you
really
do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting
places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it
a try.
-
- He sat in his girlfriend, Tamsin's, aunt's house in
Crouch
End, and he began to hack. McKinnon was looking for - and found time and
again - network administrators in high levels of the US government and
military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords.
That's how he got in.
-
- He did a few trial runs, 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."
-
- "Like where?" I ask.
-
- "The US Space Command," he says.
-
- And so, for the next seven years, on and off, McKinnon
sat in that 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, McKinnon's connection would be cut. This would
never fail to freak out the then-stoned McKinnon.
-
- When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just
an ordinary, self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone.
"Once
you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status
- and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers
from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand."
-
- "All on at once?" I ask. "You could see
hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks
or the military realising?"
-
- "Every night," he says.
-
- "What was the most exciting thing you
saw?"
-
- "I found a list of officers' names," he says,
"under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'. 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."
-
- "The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I
ask.
-
- "That's what this trickle of evidence has led me
to believe."
-
- "What were the ship names?"
-
- "I can't remember," he says. "I was
smoking
a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
-
- This was November 2000. By now, McKinnon 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," he says. "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,
McKinnon was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He snooped
around all the forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, and others - reading
internal
court-martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder
and drug abuse.
-
- "You end up lusting after more and more complex
security measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved
computer
games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Hugely
addictive."
It was never really politically motivated.
-
- Yes, he was hacking immediately after September 11, 2001,
but only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy. "Why
did the building fall like a controlled series of explosions?" he
asks. "I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for
myself."
-
- He strenuously denies the Justice Department's charge
that he caused the "US military district of Washington" to become
"inoperable". Well, once, he admits - but only once - he
inadvertently
pressed the wrong button and may have deleted some government files.
-
- "I thought, 'Ooh, bloody hell.' And that's when
I stopped for a while. And then my friend told me about DARPA. And so I
started again."
-
- DARPA is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency,
an intriguing collection of brilliant military scientists, funded by the
Pentagon. DARPA has been widely credited with inventing, among other
things,
the internet, the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and -
somewhat more boneheadedly - FutureMAP, an online futures market designed
to predict assassinations and bombings by encouraging investor speculation
in such crimes. The US Senate once described FutureMAP as "an
unbelievably
stupid idea". DARPA has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists
because it is semi-secretive, bizarre and occupies that murky world that
lies between science and war.
-
- McKinnon was caught in November 2002. He says it was
inevitable because he was "getting a bit sloppy". He pauses.
"I'd never have envisaged this happening to myself, but I did get
a bit megalomaniacal, as well. It got a bit silly. I ended up talking to
people I hacked into - I'd instant-message them, using WordPad, with a
bit of a political diatribe. You know, I'd leave a message on their desktop
that read, 'Secret government is blah blah blah."'
-
- McKinnon was tracked down because he'd used his email
address to download a hacking program called Remotely Anywhere. "God
knows why I used my real email address," he says. "I suppose
it means I'm not a secretive, sophisticated checking myself
every-step-of-the-way
type of hacker."
-
- On the night before his arrest, McKinnon had been up
playing games. "Maybe I'd been doing a bit of weak, fun hacking,
too,"
he says. "I'd had one hour's sleep, and I woke up completely muddled,
and suddenly at the bottom of my bed there was this voice: 'Hello, my
name's
Jeff Donson from the National High Tech Crime Unit. Gary McKinnon, you're
under arrest.'
-
- "They put Tamsin and me in the meat wagon. They
took my PC, Tamsin's PC, three other computers I was fixing for friends.
They went upstairs and took my girlfriend's aunty's daughter's
computer."
-
- McKinnon was kept in a police station overnight. Then
the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They
said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good
boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the
whole sentence.'
-
- "I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said,
'Oh, no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right
of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in
writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I
said no, she was very 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy'."
-
- In return, McKinnon offered a somewhat harebrained
counter
deal, via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat
to them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff
I've seen,' kind of thing." He pauses and blushes slightly.
-
- "You know, the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The
spaceships. 'The whole world thinks it's co-operating in building the
International
Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer
to as Non-Terrestrial Officers."' There is a silence. "I had
very little evidence. It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really,
is it?"
-
- Given the Justice Department has announced the
information
McKinnon downloaded was not "classified", and he was stoned much
of the time, perhaps we can assume NASA is not too worried about his
"discoveries".
-
- McKinnon hasn't spoken publicly before, but now, with
the extradition proceedings, nothing is left open to him. For a while,
he thought he might end up like the computer nerd from WarGames, having
a brilliant career working for the Americans. "They need people like
me," he says. "But that's not going to happen."
-
- He and Tamsin have split. He no longer lives in Crouch
End, but in the nearby, slightly more down-at-heel Bounds Green, and has
given up smoking dope. He is not allowed near the internet, is not allowed
a passport, and spends a lot of time reading and sitting in the pub,
awaiting
his fate.
-
- Nothing much happened in the years since his arrest in
2002 under the Computer Misuse Act - no charges were brought against him
in Britain. Then, on June 8, he found himself in front of Bow Street
magistrates,
the target of extradition proceedings. That's when the panic attacks kicked
in again, the horror visions of life in a US jail. He had poked around,
he says, but he hadn't broken anything, besides that one mistake. He
thought
he was going to get a year, max. Now they're talking about 70 years.
"You
know," he says. "everyone thinks this is fun or exciting. But
it isn't exciting to me. It is terrifying."
-
- The extradition hearing will resume on July 27.
-
- http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology
- /the-nerd-who-saw-too-much/2005/07/12/
- 1120934245512.html?oneclick=true
|
