Hacker saw UFO images
Gary McKinnon, an Englishman accused by the US Military of perpetrating the "biggest military computer hack of all time" by hacking into the US Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defence and NASA, has given a video interview to the BBC where he says he was motivated by trying to uncover photographic evidence of UFO's and suppressed technology. He also says he found that evidence.
In a rebuttal to US press hysteria over the case, McKinnon says that he broke in by finding Windows computers that had emtpy Administrator passwords, used RemoteAnywhere to do control the remote desktops, and there were constantly other hackers from around the world on these systems already. "There were no lines of defence" says McKinnon.
Things get really interesting/strange when he says that he was told by a NASA photographic expert that NASA "... regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging." McKinnon says he found a satellite image before it had been retouched, viewed it on the remote system and started to download it, but was discovered and disconnected. Wouldn't you know it?
The story has been debated by uber-geeks over at Slashdot, where most agree that, technically, some parts of his story don't hold up. Some Slashdot readers suggested that McKinnon actually broke into a NASA honeypot, a deliberate trap filled with false, though tantalizing, information in order to catch hackers.
Whatever the truth, it makes for an interesting story whichever way you look at it. The US want McKinnon jailed for 60 years and are trying to extradite him from the UK. Are the US Government's networks really that insecure? Did McKinnon find real information or was he deliberately fed misinformation so he could be caught? Is 60 years too much for accessing an insecure system? Let me know what you think.
Technorati Tags: Gary McKinnon, hackers, ufos, technology, NASA
posted by David McDonald @ 2:06 pm
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5 Comments:
Thanks for the links you left at Foostie Muse. It's interesting stuff. I think 60 years is a tad long.
I agree, 60 years is definately to harsh a sentence. As usual, the US Govt doesn't get it - it was their slack security that enabled him to get into their systems, not l33t hacking skills.
Do you have a link to the satellite image your article refers to? There is an image currently circulating (in this link http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/E31835F9-23F4-425A-A99E-3CA6260CC314/ )
which is said to have been taken around the time of the Texas UFO sightings in January 2008 -- which would make the current image questionable since the incident you refer to happened over a year and a half ago. Thanks for your response.
I don't have a link to any of the McKinnon images unfortunately.
However, I would be interested to know more about his case, and what his current status is if anyone can help?
Thanks for your prompt reply.
I haven't had much luck finding the original image, so that I could compare with these new ones (if indeed they are new), as it seems all the links I find take me to sites and articles that have been taken down.
To answer your question about the current status of McKinnon, I found this website which seems to have all the information: http://www.freegary.org.uk/
It looks like he is in jail now, with the US pressuring the UK to extradite him for trial in Va. I am from the US and I sure as heck hope that the UK gov. does NOT give him up to the US gov. He poses no military threat, and if anything, he showed NASA where their security holes are, and should be thankful to him for that.
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