Gary McKinnon, the self-confessed pot-smoking, Asperger’s-diagnosed British hacker who went by the nickname “Solo”, and who hacked into several U.S. military computer systems (including at the Pentagon and NASA) and now faces extradition to the U.S. to stand trial, has none other than former hostage and Anglican envoy Terry Waite pulling for him.
Nearly four years after Gary McKinnon was first apprehended, the U.S. appears to be close to actually having McKinnon delivered to U.S. soil.
Waite, who knows a thing or two about being locked up in hostile holding, said that McKinnon’s act of the breaching of various U.S. military sites was “hardly that of a serious spy.” In fact, says Waite, “The Pentagon ought to thank him for exposing the vulnerability of their systems.”
McKinnon has always maintained that he was simply looking for evidence of alien encounters during his hacking forays through the U.S. government cyberspace. Indeed, he claims to have found evidence of extra-terrestrial visitors to the United States on at least one government computer. “I found a list of officers’ names under the heading ‘Non-Terrestrial Officers’… 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,” claimed McKinnon.
Opines Waite, “Gary is clearly a very clever chap. He has that unique ability to find his way through the internet jungle and enter the inner recesses of the Pentagon. Full marks for his ingenuity.”
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But, he adds, “Was Gary a spy? Was he attempting to bring down the mighty military force of the USA? As far as I know he was not. He was simply looking for little green men!”
McKinnon’s bid to avoid extradition goes to judifical review in Britain in June.
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The US government has caused McKinnon to be taken far more seriously than he should have been, and has turned what should have been a ridiculous and almost trivial case (at least for everyone other than McKinnon) into a giant mess. By blowing the whole affair out of proportion, they’ve turned yet another 3rd-rate hacker into a folk hero for a bunch of people who don’t quite understand what he did but can readily understand that he is being threatened with far worse than he can possibly deserve. Perversely, McKinnon will probably end up on the other end of this ordeal in a far better spot professionally than his demonstrated skills, judgment, and ethics could possibly justify. The best career option for a black-hat hacker without serious technical talent is to get caught by self-important blowhards who cannot admit their own errors. You can bet that in a decade, McKinnon will be doing “security consulting” for people too stupid to be trusted with cash.