Gary McKinnon awaits extradition to the US to face charges for “the biggest military hack of all time”
By Robert Nelson
Gary McKinnon, a British computer expert has just lost his extradition appeal and will soon be brought over to the US to face trial for what is still referred to as “the biggest military hack of all time”.
McKinnon was originally arrested back in 2002, and was charged with causing $700,000 worth of damage after breaking into a total of 97 computer systems from the Pentagon, U.S. Army, Navy and even NASA.
These crimes took place back in 2001 and 2002 and ended up causing the complete U.S. Army’s Military District of Washington network which consisted of more than 2,000 computers to be forced offline for 24 hours.
The interesting part about this story, is that even though the crimes took place in 2001 and 2002 they were done with software that was bought off the shelf and using a 56k dial-up modem all from his home computer. Of course, dial-up modems were much more common back then as broadband connections were still in their infancy, but I am sure we can all agree that doing something of this nature from your home computer is not the smartest.
McKinnon was able to gain access through a Microsoft Windows program that was not secured with a password, and once in he began scanning the networks. One may wonder just what McKinnon was looking for while snooping around in the US Governments computers, well it seems he was looking for evidence that confirmed the existence of extra-terrestrials and UFO’s.
Once the extradition is completed, McKinnon will face trial here in the US and he faces up to a possible 70 years in jail along with fines that could total as much as $1.75 million.
Its hard to argue that he should not be punished, but at the same time 70 years sounds like a harsh punishment, especially considering some who choose to commit murder do not even face that long. It should be interesting to see the outcome and find out just how much time he actually has to serve.
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August 3rd, 2008
Gary McKinnon is being railroaded by the US.
I read the prosecution has already said they want him ‘to fry,’ which is prejudicial and a perversion of justice.
Rule of US law is, “innocent until PROVED guilty.”
He seems to be being charged ‘ex post facto’. Which, in the US is illegal as a country with a ‘Bill of Rights’.
In fact, ‘ex post facto’ has been shot down before in the USA judicial system as unconstitutional.
I suggest the British Gov’ give him diplomatic immunity and employ him at the GHQ hacking into gov’ computer systems everywhere…and this time on a T1 line, or better yet the new 40 Gigabytes per second connection, demonstrated in Sweden.
He will not get a fair trial in the USA, he should seek a trial in a neutral nation.
as
August 4th, 2008
“bought over to the US”? “bought”? Have you ever heard of the word “brought”? Doesn’t *anyone* in the United States speak English?
Anyway, I would say Microsoft are the guiltiest party, since they have, as per usual, left room for their software to be hacked. The U.S. armed forces must also bear some of the blame – anyone who deploys Microsoft products in an environment where security is an important consideration is really just asking for trouble.
August 4th, 2008
this guy “hacked” into the govt computers just like a thief “breaks and enters” an open door. He is not a high level hacker he used remote desktop to try to connect to computers with no administrator password. You would think that govt security would be a little higher than no password for admin accounts.