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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."
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
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
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/
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
http://www.spy.org.uk/freegary/archives/2005/07/ga eymckinnon_in.html
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
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!
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.
Transcript:
He says he is just a geek
He says he didnt damage systems, but the US gov considers it damage if you even have to make changes once you know the system is comprimised
He was a hairdresser, then got an "Access certification"
Then he started doing research in UFO research
He believes there is anti-gravity propulsion that was recovered by alien spacecraft
He continues sounding like a nut about UFO technology that the USA now uses
Claims he wants to provide the free energy that the US army uses to the rest of the world
He "hacked" by accessing computers with blank admin passes (windoze)
Allegedly there was mulitple people on the same networks
Haha...he knows this from netstat, there was connections all over
Apparently he found proof because people were airbrushing out UFO's from satellite images
Also an excel spreadsheet with "non terrestrial officers" on the list
Hahahahahaha she asked if he was doing a lot of drugs during this time, and he said he was smoking a bit of weed
He stopped washing himself at one point he said
He left his job and lost his girlfriend
But he lived with that girlfriend even afterwords (what a pimp!)
Somehow they bring Iraq and 9/11 into this
He got busted after playing videogames all night
Americans started talking about extradition, so thats when he was getting concerned, it somehow jumped from 2 years to 4 years to 18 years to 70 years.
He thinks he is a scapegoat for all the hacking going on
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Don't really know the US law, but I thought that in modern world there would be no sentences over 20 years.
1) It's common to stack sentences over here. A murderer might end up facing several consecutive life sentances.
2) Prison guards have a very, very strong lobbying presence in California (not sure about the rest of the US). They frequently agitate for longer prison time, no matter what the crime.
(a repulsive and immoral practice, imho)
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
These are not normal times.
Beware, or this may become the "normal times".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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.
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 can certainly understand why it happened. I can think myself into the policemens situation. Someone is running, he is wearing a coat that may conceal explosives, you yell at him to stop, he runs away, he jumps the gate to the metro station, down the stairs and you are following. He then makes the fatal mistake of boarding the train just after the terror attacks that have happened. There is pretty much only one thing to do and that is to take him out before he explodes the train. I can also understand the person running. Imagine that you are walking in London, you grew up in the harsh streets of a larger Brazilian town, you know everything about surviving in the streets. Suddenly three people dressed as ordinary men yell something and starts coming towards you looking very threatening. One pulls a fire arm, big and black in his hand. Instinct and panic takes over and you turn around, the only thing in your mind is to get away from these guys, whoever they are. They are yelling something but you can't make it out clearly. There are no uniforms, just three guys coming at you - one with a gun in his hand. You runs towards the nearby metro station, jumps the gates, down the escalators and as you try to get on a train which is just about to leave you half stumble, falls you feel the pain and hear the bang when the first bullet is unloaded into your body, it then goes black. I don't really blame the policemen, they were trying to do their job and I think they were doing it. I find the whole thing to be a tragedy of gigantig proportions and I feel for the poor guys family. I hope things like this will never have to happen to any one again. But I know that people are only people, mistakes will happen and in certain situations there is nothing you could do. Had I been the guy I would probably been startled but I would not have done what he did. Had I been the police I would have been hesitant to fire, and therefore perhaps it is a good thing I am not a police officer because I don't think I would have the guts to do his job. A tragic accident.
-- ICQ: 1645566 Yahoo: Ichimusai MSN: Ichimusai http://www.ichimusai.org/
Stockwell (where the guy was executed) is the kind of place that if 3 dodgy looking blokes with guns try to stop you, you WOULD run!! The combination of fear and not having English as ones mother tongue is far enough to explain this mans actions.
THe IRA bombings didnt scare me. The Al-Qaeda bombings didnt scare me. The Metropolitan Police with a shoot-to-kill policy...THAT scares me shitless!
It's nice to see that you would raise the penalty for resisting arrest to death, and that the need for a trial should be waived in those circumstances. Hopefully one day the police don't decide you're 'resisting arrest' and take action.
Just about every tyranny in history began with the words "for the good of the people and the security of our nation".
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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
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
Are you completely indifferent that more than 50 people died because the police didn't stop any suspicious looking people?
I'm not. I think it's awful.
Now I have to ask you...
1) Are you completely indifferent that our own goverments are using these terrorists against us to implement draconian surveillance such random bag searches, and gunning down our own people?
2) Are you completely indifferent to the fact that you're averaging between 20-50 civilian deaths in Iraq EACH MONTH since the US went in? So all of a sudden we have an incident in Britain and it's okay to gun people down because they're behaving suspiciously.
Get some perspective, and stop using violence to justify more violence before we decend into hell. Do you really want where you live to become a police state, a war zone, or worse?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.