Gary McKinnon Update: UK OBSERVER-Briton facing 60 years in US prison after hacking into Pentagon

•                         Jamie Doward, home affairs editor
•   The Observer,
• Sunday July 27 2008

On
the eve of a Lords ruling over US demands for his extradition, a
British computer hacker claims that American prosecutors threatened to
haul him before a military tribunal.

When he wakes up this morning, Gary
McKinnon will be 72 hours from learning whether he is on the fast track
to a 60-year prison sentence, thanks to his obsession with aliens.

McKinnon,
42, from Enfield in north London, is accused by American prosecutors of
illegally accessing top-secret computer systems in what they claimed in
one legal document was ‘the biggest military computer hack of all
time’.

The self-taught IT expert insists he was simply looking
for information the US government had on UFOs and is adamant that he
never damaged any of its computer systems. This argument, however, cuts
little ice with the Americans, who are trying to extradite him. Five
years after being told by British police that he would probably get a
six-month community service order for his exploits, McKinnon finds
himself still wanted by the US authorities. A 2006 High Court ruling
granted the extradition request, and on Wednesday the House of Lords
will decide on McKinnon’s appeal against that ruling.

That it
should come to this is little short of outrageous, say his supporters.
Soon after he was arrested in 2002, US prosecutors appeared to offer
McKinnon a deal: if he agreed to extradition and admitted his guilt, he
would get a sentence of three to four years, most of which could be
served in the UK. When McKinnon rejected the offer – made in
confidential meetings at the US embassy – his lawyers were told ‘all
bets were off’. They claim the US prosecutors upped the stakes,
suggesting he would be ‘treated like a terrorist’ if he did not agree
to face trial and plead guilty in the US.

McKinnon claims that at
one stage there were suggestions that he would face a military
tribunal, possibly at Guantánamo Bay. ‘They said they wanted to see me
fry,’ he said.

McKinnon’s lawyers claim that attempts to force
him to accept a plea bargain constituted ‘an unlawful abuse of the
court process’.

A Lords ruling in favour of McKinnon, who has
become a cause célèbre for UFO enthusiasts, computer users and civil
liberties groups, would force US prosecutors to restart their
extradition process in the magistrates’ courts, a major setback that
could have ramifications for other Britons resisting removal to the US.
A ruling against him would mean an appeal to the European Court of
Human Rights and leave him in legal limbo, banned from travelling
abroad, forced to report to police every Friday, and barred from
accessing the internet.

In a further twist, it has emerged that a
crucial file containing details of the early meetings with the US
prosecutors, at which the offers were apparently made, has gone missing
from the office of McKinnon’s solicitor. A laptop holding details of
the same meetings was stolen from the car of one of his barristers.

The
revelations have prompted febrile speculation among McKinnon’s
supporters, who fear that events have taken a sinister turn. McKinnon
believes his phone has been bugged and claims to have been followed. As
a result of his exploits, no IT company will now offer McKinnon a job.
‘I think it’s bloody ridiculous,’ he said. ‘They should employ me to
bust paedophile rings or credit card frauds rather than stick me in
jail for the rest of my life.’

These days he earns a living
driving a fork-lift truck. It seems a mundane job for a man who between
1999 and 2002 broke into the most secure computer systems in the world
from his north London flat. Using a computer language called Perl and a
cheap PC, McKinnon linked a number of computer systems to search for US
databases that were not protected by a password. ‘I could scan 65,000
machines in less than nine minutes,’ McKinnon said.

McKinnon
unearthed unprotected computer systems operated by the US army, the
navy, the Pentagon and Nasa. On every system he hacked, he left
messages. ‘It was frightening because they had little or no security,’
he said. ‘I was always leaving messages on the desktop saying, "your
security is really crap".’

One message has come back to haunt
him. ‘I said US foreign policy was akin to government-sponsored
terrorism and I believed 9/11 was an inside job. It was a political
diatribe,’ he admitted.

In the end, the ease with which he
could hack the systems became his undoing. ‘I got sloppy. I went to
places directly rather than jump through systems. Nasa tracked back my
IP address.’

McKinnon’s interest in aliens was started by an
internet-based group of UFO enthusiasts called The Disclosure Project.
The group had collected more than 200 testimonies – some from people
who have served in the US military – that ‘confirm’ that
extra-terrestrials exist. Not only that but, according to McKinnon,
some of the testimonies offered proof that ‘certain parts of Western
intelligence had acquired and reverse-engineered their technology,
mainly weaponry and free energy’.

Intrigued, McKinnon used the
testimonies to help him search top-secret US databases for information
about free energy. ‘I felt if it existed it should be publicly
available,’ he said. He says he came across many other hackers in the
supposedly secure systems, many with Chinese and Russian internet
addresses. Since his exploits were exposed, consecutive government
reports have confirmed that the US military’s computer systems remain
poorly protected.

McKinnon was caught before he could find any
confidential information on ‘free energy’, but he saw enough to believe
the US authorities are suppressing what they know about aliens. He says
he came across a document written by a Nasa official who claimed the
agency has to airbrush UFOs out of satellite photos because ‘there are
so many of them’.

With only a 56k modem, he found that
downloading the huge volume of documents was too time-consuming. But
McKinnon claims that he managed to capture almost two-thirds of an
image of what he believes was either a UFO or a top-secret US craft
operating in space.

The picture was confiscated, along with all
the other material McKinnon downloaded. The material included an Excel
spreadsheet entitled ‘non-terrestrial officers’ and a list of names.
‘It was a really weird phrase,’ McKinnon said. ‘Maybe it was the secret
development of a space force. Space is the next frontier and it’s
already being weaponised.’

His hacking career came to an abrupt
end one morning in March 2002. The National High Tech Crime Unit
searched his flat and arrested McKinnon and his then girlfriend. ‘They
said "you’ll probably get six months’ community service",’ McKinnon
claimed.

In the end the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to
prosecute, but two years later, after crime unit officials visited
Washington, apparently taking McKinnon’s hard drive, the US government
began extradition proceedings. ‘Now I’m facing 60 years in prison,’
McKinnon said. ‘I believe my case is being treated so seriously because
they’re scared of what I’ve seen. I’m living in a surreal, nutter’s
film.’

The greatest hackers

Jonathan James
At 16 he was the first juvenile to be jailed (for six months) for
hacking in 2000. He targeted high-profile organisations including Nasa,
stealing more than $1.7m worth of software.

Adrian Lamo
Broke into organisations such as the New York Times and Microsoft
between 2002-2003 using internet connections at coffee shops and
libraries. He had to pay $65,000, serve six months of home confinement
and two years’ probation.

Kevin Mitnick The
Department of Justice called him ‘the most wanted computer criminal in
United States history’ for his hacking activities between 1982 and
1992. He served five years, eight months in solitary confinement.

Kevin Poulsen
Known as Dark Dante, he hacked into LA radio’s KIIS-FM phone lines,
earning himself a Porsche. Called ‘Hannibal Lecter of computer crime’
for his hacking activities between 1985 and 1991, he served five years
in prison.

Source: itsecurity.com