Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Gary McKinnon Interviewed
G0rAk writes "The BBC World Service has a half hour audio interview with British hacker Gary McKinnon. As recently reported on/. and BBC News, Gary was arrested and freed on bail pending extradition proceedings to the U.S. There, he faces charges of gaining unauthorised access and causing criminal damage to military computers in his search for evidence of UFO coverups and anti-gravity technology of extra-terrestrial origin. In a very candid interview, Gary re-affirms that he had no malicious intent, was amazed at the ease with which he penetrated the networks, explains in detail what evidence of UFO coverups he saw, describes a personal journey through hell as he became obsessed with the project and how very scared he is that he could be facing up to seventy years in a Virginian jail. A bit of a nut, perhaps. But a fascinating listen that helps a lot in making that judgment. The Interview can be listened to with RealPlayer from 11:32 GMT (06:32 EST) on Saturday until the same time next week."
The British police could have just shot him on sight of course.
liqbase
This has scapegoat written all over it and has a striking resemblance to the Kevin Mitnick detention. I find it questionable the government claims he caused 900k USD in damages. How can that be? System cleaning, turning on security (which should have been on already)? Their ineptness lead to this breach of "security", if anything they should thank Gary for pointing out their shortcomings... Better him than a terrorist.
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
...Reminding us that you don't necessarily have to be stupid to be more than a little crazy...
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
I really dislike Real-Streams and a transcript is nicer anyway IMHO :-)
Cue Slashdot armchair attorneys.
I would have had the first post if
it was not for that darned space-time distortion!
If he found the plans for anti-gravity, why doesn't he just make some boots or perhaps a belt and leap over the wall? That's what Lex Luthor would do.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
This is my first post.. Woo hoo!
The US government is going to make an example out of him, assuming he actually gets convicted.
I have to say, though, that even if the government computers were wide open, finding documents about UFO's seems like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
I'm the GNAA and I vote
What will the children think??!
Is there any reason why people keep using this? Does anybody have an mp3 mirror, I'd be interested in listening to this guy.
How about someone hack this real player (tm) interview and put it into MP3 for us?
/. community member in MD, US
I'll do it if someone sends me instructions. I think this BBC encourages remixing, and format changing stuff, right?
Sincerly,
A concerned
What is the preffered non-real alternative to play .ram files these days?
paul reinheimer
People, it's time we take a stand against the Slashdot editors!
Imagine if Slashdot was an OS, and every dupe, unchecked story, instance of google ass kissing, advertisement hidden in an article, etc was some sort of security exploit.
What would you get? And would this OS stand the critisism of the slashdot crowd?
Join the slashdot jihad!
http://www.anti-slash.org/
If I were the government, i'd have a weak-security honeypot sitting out there somewhere with faked UFO documents. That way when someone see's them, they'll think, "Big Bird is a front for communication to other aliens to tell them that we're already owned by the greys!"
The funny part comes when they try to go to the media.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Is Gary McKinnon a nigger? Because I HATE NIGGERS.
http://www.spy.org.uk/freegary/archives/2005/07/ga eymckinnon_in.html
The guy thought that 9/11 was a hoax and thought he found evidence of UFO's and "Non-Terrestrial Officers" being transfered, thinking that there is some fleet of Anti-Gravity Spacecraft. Now he is facing 70 years in an American federal prison. That is a lot of work for nothing really show for it.
Silly American military for setting up Windows with blank administrator passwords too. Whole thing is kinda silly.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
Rather than just saying "you hacked government computers, that's illegal, off to jail," they're charging him for close to a million dollars of damage on machines which should have been secured from the first place?
I'm glad to know my tax dollars are supporting cracking down on the real criminals.
(+1 insightful, -1 flamebait)
That sentence sounds really absurd, Seventy years? Don't really know the US law, but I thought that in modern world there would be no sentences over 20 years.
So, where is the unfunny/insensitive/tasteless mod when you need it?
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
he sounds like he's well on his way to an insanity defense ....
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. If you know you're not supposed to sneak around a company or agency's property, then why do you think it's ok to break into their computers? In most parts of the world, just walking into someone's house and looking around without the owner's permission would get you beaten or killed by the owner. It's common courtesy and most of these "hackers" seem to lack any of it.
As for the "horror" of his extradition, don't blame uncle sam. The British government is big enough to tell our government to piss off if it felt such a thing weren't warranted. The main reason that we don't do such a thing to our citizens is that most countries that would want our people sent over to them wouldn't give them a fair trial, and that's not inherently because they're American. A Chinese is probably no more like to get a fair trial in Mugabe's Zimbabwe than an American. Foreign governments know that if our people attack them, that our law enforcement will arrest them and prosecute them, even if the country is hostile. The feds threatened to arrest the Americans who defaced Chinese websites after the PLA-Air Force brough our AWAC down early in Bush's first term. Few governments, China's especially, would do that to their own people.
Every so often I get some dumbass at my university trying to get me to teach them those "mad skillz" of h@x0ring that apparently all CS majors have. My interest was always in programming, not in things like that. They even have the gall to look at me like I'm the asshole, when I tell them that I've never bothered to learn such things, that I feel that what they want to do is morally wrong and that they should learn to actually respect others' privacy and property. The same people would probably wonder what the hell is wrong with someone who asked them to teach them how to use a jimmy to open up some frat boy's car so they could screw around in his mustang. IMO, there's really no difference.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
I don't care if he found a picture of ET doing shots with Paris Hilton. He hacked into a computer system and started fucking around. I don't care if he's a scapegoat - he still broke the law.
If so, I would hope that an English judge would block extradition on the basis of the failure of the US to subscribe to the UN Declaration on Human Rights.
Of course, in the UK prison system you have the right to inhabit overcrowded cells, be locked up with racist murderers to see if you get killed, and eventually commit suicide. But that's OK because it is protecting our rights and we are the good guys.
Yes, I am getting a bit tedious about this. But I am really annoyed that the UK courts so far have failed to perceive that this case is bovine excrement of the CMA variety. You exposed the weakness of our security! Shoot the messenger!
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
At one point in the interview, this guy talks about some of the things he saw, in regards to UFO activity. He claims he was able to view a "large image" over "graphical remote control", but he didn't have any proof because it was "too large to download". Uhm, if it's being displayed on your screen, that's taking the same amount of time to download I would guess; even if he was seeing a scaled image, he could still do a screenshot, right? I think he's both a bit crazy and/or a liar...
I will agree that $900,000 of damage seems a bit of out line, however.
Might have invented the internet, but they've obviously not heard of a firewall.
He admits to smoking it while hacking the govt. He is _confident_ the dope didn't make him see things that weren't there.
My experience at college would disagree.
(Posting as AC to keep my job.)
A Guardian article interviewing McKinnon with much of the same information in the audio interview. The most interesting part of his XYZ conspiracy "evidence" that McKinnon describes is the "non-terrestrial officers" mentioning he found in US military documents. He seems to believe that a complete U.S. space army already exists, with those involved based in military orbiting stations.
>Mr McKinnon, an unemployed computer systems administrator, is known on the internet as "Solo".
He is able to hack into many of the most secure systems in the world, but not able to hold a IT-job?
Maybe the US government should punish him by making him do IT security for them for 10 years, he-he.
While it is reasonable to punish this guy for hacking, it is not reasonable to consider extra security measures as part of the damages incurred by him. A consulting company that informed them that extra security was needed would be paid handsomely. You would hardly talk about their service as "damage." The need for the extra security was exactly the same before the break-in as it was after.
To ward off the replies that I know are coming: I am not saying that the guy should be rewarded. I am not saying that what he did was ethical. I am saying that extra security after the fact is not "damage incurred." If someone could show that their need for security increased as a result of the break-in this would be another matter.
Here's another.
The 900k USD figure is ofcourse trumped up. It would include the direct costs of reinstalling all of the computers that were compromised or suspected of being compromised. This figure would also include the forensics and investigation costs. These costs do add up quickly. Labour, even army labour, is not cheap, and lots of staff across organizations would have been involved. The 900k would also include bullshit costs such as the time spent by a General to read the incident reports, and the cost of the pizza the commander bought to congradulate everyone on a job well done.
It can be argued that these costs are fiction. Most of the labour would have been handled by staff that would have been sitting around anyway. But if there were no incidents then some of that staff would not be required at all.
What do the posts that start with IANAL smell like?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
I would rather risk killing someone comitting a crime -- running from the police -- than potentially allowing the death of dozens of other.
Thank you!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
Yes, but the people chasing him were in plain clothes and he was coming from a bad part of town. I do not know all the details, but if a couple of guys in plain clothes came running after me waving a gun I just might just choose the flight decision path of the the flight or fight if statement - especially if I had a bar bill outstanding.
With that said tho the mulsim's are focusing on this event eventhough it was a mistake and complete ignore the 80 some civilians that islamic extremist kill with intent this weekend in Eygpt.
He can't possible be the greatest hacker alive.
If he was he wouldn't have been caught right!
I just read the transcript, it is a very sad story. The guy got hooked on doing things he shouldn't have been doing, fucked up his personal life - stopped working, broke up with his GF. I think this thing really became a game to him. Like the online multi-player games, this consumed him. He got so bad though, got really sloppy, needed more and more excitement. Used a remote tool to manipulate desktops to leave messages. It is almost as if he wanted to be found. The guy is into self-destructing behaviour. I think this is a very sad story because he got what he wanted.
You can't handle the truth.
I stopped feeling bad about the Brits as soon as I read about this shooting. Next time you Sirs and Lords get hit, I won't feel bad for you. Maybe that's what your nation deserves. And to come to think of it, Britain has been the perpetrator of terrorism on most of humanity....all the imperialism shit, and now the iraq war. No wonder people hate you and bomb you. Ever heard about bombs going off in...say...New Zealand...that's a free and democratic and civilized country...no one's bombing them ! Stop being assholes and stop blowing other people up if you don't want other people to blow up themselves on your turf.
This guy is a complete wack job. He said he couldn't transfer the pictures to his computer because they were too big. Yeah right.
My spider senses tell me
If extradited, the whole (space aliens aspect) will be played up by the guy's lawyer and he'll probably be declard "unfit" to be locked away in Virginia prison and gang raped for 25 years.
Sigh.... those slimly liberal lawyers and their lawyer doublespeak, getting in the way of state-sanctioned ritual rape.
God bless the penal (no pun) system.
From TFA:
"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.
"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."
"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"
"I guess so," says Gary.
"What were the ship names?"
"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
This is too funny! They can make an example out of him in both the War on Terrah and the War on Drugs!
"I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
No sympathy from me. He can rot in jail. Tougher sentences handed out by the thousands may get these guys attention.
Not if you give their explanation for their own actions any creedence. The shot him because they thought if they left him alive he woud detonate a bomb.
his arrogance has gotten him in more trouble again.
Open access to the unclassified systems Gary 0wn3d, this is a surprise? The Federal Govt buys computer systems by the trainload for use in a large and widely distributed organization. Like any other organization, its members ain't always going to follow best practices, unless the penalties for not doing so are extremely career limiting, as is the case on honest-to-God classified systems and networks.
And I'm only posting this because of all the damage. This is not the place for discussing the London Bombings. He apparently got material supporting that UFO's are not things that are common knowledge and the quetion we should be asking is will any of the information he got get distributed, or will what he did be rendered useless by the powers that be.
At hohocon (this was Defcon before there was such a thing as Defcon), in 1991, in Austin TX, Erik Bloodaxe and Doc Holiday from LOD announced "project green cheese", designed to entice hackers to to break into military systems to uncover evidence of extra-terrestrial activity. I don't think anyone took it seriously, but this is the first time since that in where I've heard of someone actually attempting something similiar to this (or at least with this type of motive).
This was the same con where John Draper gave his speech about phreaking in eastern Europe, and the old days of blue boxing.
Does anyone else remember Hohocon?
-merc
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Okay, I can't argue that this wasn't hacking, but having recently been accused of it myself, I'm curious where other people stand.
intentionally vague but trueIn my case, I was given a username and password and address of a server for ftp. I wondered what else was out there so I logged in via ssh. No special trick needed, the firewall was open, I had a server account, had a shell and all I did was gather a little basic info on what the server was and what it was running. Apparently nobody realized they had set all that up for me. Some admin panicked, somebody in authority (over me) panicked and next thing I know I'm sitting in an office explaining my actions to somebody that has a LOT more authority.
I certainly wouldn't argue that uploading root kits/security cracking tools, downloading encrypted files to attempt to crack encryption isn't wrong but what exactly is?
My questions (is it legal/is it hacking):
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
"Yes, but the people chasing him were in plain clothes and he was coming from a bad part of town"
Blink: The power of thinking without thinking by Malcolm Gladwell has a similiar police shooting as one of it's examples.
---
The "are you a script" word for today is murders.
I have experience working with the U.S. Federal Government as an IT contractor in various capacities. While I find it completely possible Mr. McKinnon penetrated a system using a default password and was able to access various documents, I strongly doubt people's interpretations of what he saw.
This is based on several factors in his story, including the ease with which he was able to penetrate this system as well as the total lack of understanding of the English language common to people in positions of authority in the U.S. Federal government.
First off, I have had the displeasure of being party to audits by the Office of the Inspector General and am familiar with their standards for assessing IT policy based on the security level of content being housed on the server. They are fairly standard, highly regimented, and include every possible protection someone could have imagined 3 years ago.
While these requirements do not automatically extend to military networks, they are regarded as being less stringent than military networks (for instance, you will commonly see references to 'military grade standards' when receiving proposals from other contractors).
One specific requirement of an OIG assessment is evidence of the enforcement of a password security. They check to see whether users are required to have passwords, how often passwords expire, how many characters should be in each password, the minimum number of characters that must be non-alphanumeric, etc.
The type of content Mr. McKinnon accessed surely would have been classified secret if it referred to a non-public military capability, and would probably be top secret if it referred to something of extraterrestial origin. 100% of servers containing secret documents are hardened against attack in public agencies, and I would assume the same is true with the military.
All this leads me to believe it is extremely unlikely Mr. McKinnon saw what he thinks he saw, or else he is probably not being truthful in his description of how he cracked the system. I prefer to think of this in the former, but cannot really render judgement without seeing the source materials.
The other reason I am extremely skeptical of the idea Mr. McKinnon understood what he was seeing is that people in positions of authority in the U.S. Government and in the military tend to be unable to understand English to the point they are bordering on illiterate. This is not an exaggeration, I know of several agencies that require all of their SES officers to attend remedial English classes as a requirement for employment. These people commonly use words with total disregard for their meaning, their memos often communicate instructions which are exactly the opposite of their intended message, and most importantly, they give names to things which are wholly inappropriate.
If Mr. McKinnon saw a memo referring to non-terrestrial officers, we can only guess at what that term may mean. My guess is that it refers to aerial or naval forces, but it really could be anything.
M
...in total, claimed the Americans, $700,000 worth of damage had been done.
What's that amount to? Getting some keys on a keyboard stuck and stealing a mouse ball?
I listened to the interview and found the guy fascinating in his openess. He even stated quite plainly how he found out that there were others on the computer where he had gotten in by doing a netstat. That begs the question as to what the others got from their searches.
His comment about Non-Terrestrial officers and retouched photos to hide anti-grav technology sound a bit on the far side, though. While there have been numerous claims about anti-gravity using ihgh powered electro magnetic fields, given the way that the US seems unable to keep any secrets very well, I can't imagine that stuff would not have come out in the mean time.
I agree: "hacker" and "cracker" are synonymous, despite what ye olde hackers believe. It seems that this happened so long ago, that it's way beyond quixotic to keep up the fight now:
Check out this thread, dated March 7, 1989:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.36.html#subj3
Brad Templeton wrote: It is with regret that I have to say that this fight has been lost. "Hacker" and "computer criminal" are now equated in the public mind, to the extent that this use of "hacker" now appears in newspaper headlines. The German Spy breakins confirm this in papers all over the world.
Rob
The self-taught computer expert claims he encountered dozens of other hackers from all over the world while snooping on US networks.
Nice to finally know your name!
This May be redundant, but surely even the most cynical appraisal of US Military security would admit that if they were going to have ultra secret UFO documents stored anywhere, it wouldn't be on the sodding internet.
Converted to MP3 for your listening pleasure: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=333NVZ35
WHAT THE FUCK!!!!! They have no right to bust him if they didn't even bother to set a password, much less a decent password.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Am I the only one to actually read the article before posting? 3 bullet points you should consult before drawing conclusions:
- it states that the got caught because he downloaded a 'hacking program called Remotely Anywhere'. Uh? since when?
- Quoted from the article: "Q: What were the [UFO] ship names? A: I can't remember, I was smoking a lot of dope at the time."
- finally, the secret, l33t command he's using to hack in the pentagon is called 'netstat'
That article sounds flimsy and unresearched at best - in fact it has been doing the round of the free newspapers in england... you see it popping back from time to time. If the editor had taken the time to read it, it would have saved 30 minutes of everyone's life.
I've used Real Alternative, a Real Player codec quite successfully with BBC's internet offerings.
i ve.htm
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternat
When in my country you only get 25 years for killing your step daughters: NZ Herald
does the UFO run linux?
oh wait, you don't have one
It was reported in the news as the the Metropolitan police force as in this statement. They may recruit from SAS for their fast response teams and their operatives but they are as far as I know not an operative unit under the SAS. SAS is the military special forces in Great Britain.
The Metropolitan police is by far the largest policing force in the Greater London [Map] district and lately incorporated also The Royal Park Constabulary into their forces. But they are not a military branch, they are the civilian police though in certain cases they may definitely make joint operations.
The incident that lead to the unfortunate death of a most likely innocent Brazilian man is now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Service Directorate of Professional Standards which would correspond to Bureau of Internal Affairs in some other countries.
-- ICQ: 1645566 Yahoo: Ichimusai MSN: Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/
I agree that this is meant to be a deterrent against people acting against the perceived national security interests, however I have to wonder what its general effect would be.
This sort of sentence is not going to deterr the Chinese or N. Korean governments. It won't deterr Al Qaeda operatives. And these guys could theoretically leapfrog off systems in the US. And if he could enter this easily, then what of the North Koreans or the Chinese? What of militants/terrorists with hostile intentions (Islamic or not)?
I am a firm believer that there should be a two-tier punishment for these sort of incidents. I reasonably lenient punnishment for the actual tresspass and then a very severe punishment if the tresspassor can be linked to a terrorist group or foreign government.
The fact is that if national security were the priority, these systems would not have been so easily compromised.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If these are military systems and are exposed to the internet then we certainly hope that they are secure. It would probably take pretty extensive training to physically compromise the systems, and physical access in general is more difficult than internet access.
This means that if such a system could be compromised by a British script kiddie, then it most certainly could be compromised by all sorts of hostile entities ranging from wary or even hostile governments to terrorist organizations, to just people looking for kicks.
The fact that this was so easy to compromise means that the sysadmin really wasn't doing his job. And it also means that any information on those systems must be considered compromised by any hostile party.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Download QUicktime for Windows and you end up running ITunes and Ipod .exe's without asking for it.
But that's Apple, so that's ok, right?
I fully support Gary McKinnon for looking around piss-poorly secured military machines. I WORK for a military subcontractor, and they NEED a kick in the ass to get things right and get them secure.
If it takes someone to split their world in half and taunt their clueless admins, then so be it.
70 years in jail? Just give him a subcontractor job and get over your pride.
Not entirely convinced by his anti-gravity claims, but I'm fully convinced he can pwn the mil. It's not as hard as it sounds, believe me.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away - Tom Waits
You've persuaded me: I want a tee-shirt that says "What Would Lex Luthor Do?"
"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."
All I can say is...
Game over man, game ooooover!
I said that if you walked in like you had a right to be there and were caught rifling through their possessions. Meaning they find you just walking around, opening the refrigerator, drinking the milk (analogous to copying peoples' files) and snooping through their stuff. Most people wouldn't consider that an uninvited guest, regardless of countries. A hacker is not the type that says sorry and leaves immediately when they realize their mistake, but deliberately walks in like they had some right to be there.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
His stories, along with John Lear's, are way too inconsistent and, well, kind of childish. The miltary battling Greys armed with lasers 1000 feet below ground. The same military developing missiles with which to penetrate to the aliens' deep bases under the US.
Sheesh...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
I can't be bothered to read all the posts and I'm d/ling the stream now , although I have read an interview with him before but this guy is an absolute hero, what a genius. 10 out of 10 for making a complete monkey of US security.
And he was looking for aliens, spaceships and non terristrial officers ! Awesome. I recall he said he couldn't even be assed to cover his tracks anymore. It's hilarious, it's sensational, it's daring. They should give this guy a big reward. Brilliant
Whatever sentence he gets, the security officiers should be the same sentence, if those computers' information was so valuble.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
1) I think this guy has watched Hackers just a few too many times.
2) I wonder how long he thought about his situation to come up with a "humanist mission" explanation.
3) Non-terrestrial could refer to Navy, Air Force, or hell... NASA's astronauts.
I seriously think this jackass is just a script kiddie who quit his job and social life to pursue his agenda.
AND I would seriously hope our military networks are locked the fuck down (ltfd) if they detect an intruder messing around.
I think the damage was probably the time it took techs to rebuild all of the accessed machines.
I do hope he knows his British accent is going sound sexy as hell to those ass-raping inmates.
That interview was a good listen. Thanks for the link.
I am concerned that the alleged crime did not take place on American soil. So far as I know this bloke hasn't even been to the States. Certainly the "hacking" seems to have been done from a London flat.
If it happened on British soil the Americans should have the decency to respect the British courts to deal with it under British law. However decency is not something that we've come to expect from America in it its dealings with the rest of the world.
I suppose this does raise a serious question about where it actually did happen. Personally I'd say that while the effects were in the states, the direction and motivation happened in the UK and so this is where the crime took place. This seems to be by far the simplest and most pragmatic legal interpretation.
The ammount of damage he is being charged with doing seems to be ludicrous. Ok I can see how the compromised systems needed to be rebuilt....but their state of security was patently so shocking that this was required in any case - he saved them money by pointing this out sooner rather than later.
It also seems clear that this guys motivations were not malicious to the United States. I think the British courts should tell the US to stop whinging and concentrate on securing their systems. Even if their systems were unlawfully penetrated they lacked dillegence in insuring that data, particularly confidential data was not in the plain on any machine ever connected to a network.
The revelation that there exists a fleet of American spaceships is rather worrying. Is the American military under alien control? I don't believe these people could've sorted out a space fleet by themeselves - not without a blue room. Was the bombing of Iraq carried out under alien orders? If Bush and his supporters think they can get away with planting a load of goof on some computers and saying "I didn't do it", they've got another thing coming. I don't believe a word of it.
Seriously though this guy is obviously harmless. If he did any harm then its not his fault. If someone nipped into an army base and made off with some missiles and tanks then blew a few small towns up then it would be right to be more concerned with military security than the actions of the passing nutter. In fact I'd hold the military wholly responsible. I demand my right to be a passing nutter! Whether u grant it or not there will always be passing nutters.
America is a country that was founded on the premise that if the government is not doing its job, it is the DUTY of the people to rise up and do something about it. Armed rebellion is not only impractical and unnecessary, but won't solve anything. What will solve a lot of problems is information. This man thought information existed that was being injustly kept from the public so he took matters into his own hands in his quest for the truth. I agree that you can't just go around giving access to military files, but this guy isn't a terrorist...I guess I have a personal interest in this because I agree with him that we do posess a lot of technology that could revolutionize our world and choose not to release it. Whether the reason for this is money, security, power or whatever, it does not go with the principals our country was founded on. Regardless of whether he was trying to do right or wrong, the fact that our legal system is considering sentencing him to prison for 70 years (for viewing unsecured files!!!) seems like a way to shut him up about what he saw to me.
in his search for evidence of UFO coverups and anti-gravity technology of extra-terrestrial origin
He was suprised by the ease of which he was able to penetrate the networks... However he has not yet mastered the ability to send an email to bring some of this 'proof' he so claims
Basically, enter a network, say something was on there, of course, it is denied becuase it isn't on there, but they are deny it because like, you know, bruce lee is some super-human alienhybrid crime fighter with an invisible flying machine.
If the guy had been able to email something out, instead of 'describing it' I might have given him credit for finding their open shares.
Dumbass. Did he at least leave a virus on their system that could infect potential would be high tech alien invaders?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So he was searching for an extraterrestrial anal probe and came up with a prison buttfuck. Not quite as mysterious I suppose.
The point is that most legal systems wouldn't then let you then charge the intruder for new locks on the front door.
Anyone tried the real-alternative player? Thats what I use.
The indictment from virginia's court has all of the IPs of the compromised computers, which are carefully 'hidden' as black text on black background text.
I'm about 1000x to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack. And I don't drive much.
As a member of the educated internet elite I refuse to listen to sound formats that are not Free.
You are all sheep.
How did he even know the IP addresses of these machines? I am pretty sure the government doesn't store their classified information on the same servers that are the frontend to their websites. Hacking the server "fbi.gov" won't get you any fbi database, just access to the website content.
So how did he know the IP address of these servers? They aren't exactly listed anywhere.
And why are these servers accepting connections from anybody? Wouldn't it make sense to only allow connections from IP addresses owned by the government?
http://illhostit.com/ - Webhosting
I find it baffling that a highly sensitive network would be connected to the Internet.
I've worked at the Swedish Military HQ in Stockholm. Their computer network doesn't have any outside connections whatsoever. All lines are optical, and all signal levels are measured regularly to check that they're not tapped anywhere. A colleague working with support was reprimanded because he would unplug the internal network to surf the Internet on the same machine, which was strictly forbidden.
Adventure, Romance, MAD SCIENCE!
you had me at #!
I find it baffling that a highly sensitive network would be connected to the Internet.
Sensitive networks are cut off from the rest of the Internet using firewalls and other controls. Classified information is kept on unconnected networks with very strict rules about letting anything get to an unclassified system.
However, there's an old axiom in military security that a lot of public or sensitive information gathered can be collated into something that is sensitive enough to be classified.
Stockwell (where the guy was executed)...
The guy wasn't executed. According to OED, that word means "carry out a sentence of death", which is not what happened. How about accident? As is, "an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury". This sounds to me a lot more like what happened. These cops didn't set out that morning to go kill this guy. Everyone involved was thrown into a stressful situation completely outside their normal range of experience, which tends to throw people into self-preservation mode. The cops didn't want to get blown up, the poor SOB didn't want to get shot. It's difficult in these situations to quickly and accurately assess everything that's going on, and cops aren't trained to do that. Cops are trained to keep the peace, which in the majority of cases is a pretty low-key, simple process. Special response units exist to deal with situations like that in London, and they are trained to act in extreme situations. What happened sucks for everyone involved, but sometimes shit happens and people get hurt or die. The only thing you can do afterwards is try to understand what happened so you can avoid making the same mistake twice; all the whining, "what if"-ing, and "should have"s in the world won't change what happened, and won't help avoid it in the future. And please don't give me any "oh, they *accidentally* shot someone in the back?" crap, either. Of course they decided to shoot. That doesn't make it not an accident.
I also have to say that if terrorist bombings don't scare you but police do, you're clueless, retarded, or just an asshole. You also have obviously never had anything remotely bad happen to you or anywhere near you in your life - and no, mommy and daddy splitting up or getting beat up in high school don't count. A bunch of complete pricks with nothing more than an idealogical bone to pick indiscriminately killed EIGHTY people, and you're afraid of some cops who made a mistake trying to save lives? What the fuck is wrong with you?
Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
My uncle is stationed at a nameless Naval base currently. About a year ago, when he came to visit my family, he told my father and I about how one of the "servers" in his office was found to be serving warez.
Apparently, the system had no passwords and no firewall. It just also happened to be sitting on a "very fast" (an OC3, IIRC) internet connection.
This was observed, and a warez group soon started to host gigabytes of files.. very easily. This was only discovered after someone had been found with pr0n on their government-property computer, and the office network traffic was looked at a bit closer.
Holy shit, a three digit UIN. Sorry, it's the first I've seen.
I thought he was still alive. This is just like that Brazilian guy that was shot in exactly the same way!!!