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NASA Hacker Gary McKinnon Interviewed
An anonymous reader writes "A BBC article reports about an interview between Click and Gary McKinnon who in 2002 hacked into NASA and other US Military networks. In the interview he talks about how he accessed machines by using default passwords and a conversation with a NASA network engineer using Wordpad. He also talks about how he found information about anti-gravity, UFO technology, free energy and how UFOs are regularly airbrushed out from high-resolution satellite images."
1) Hacking into NASA for three years with a 56k only?
2) What about using the "Print" button which makes a screenshot? (Well, in Windows it does.)
3) They are suppressing free energy? Why? Free energy would launch an incredible boom for economy, help greatly in pollution reduction, provide an excellent way of getting rid of oil dependency, provide instant cheap space exploration (and thus access to the vast resources on the moon and in the asteroid belt, for example), erase any poverty and/or hunger etc. So WHY should anyone suppress that? Can anyone tell me why?
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If you had watched the video recording of the interview you would know that the transcript presented is actually pretty dumbed down and poor.
It seems more credible from the video.
Not that I beleive the guy or anything, but this actually seems possible. He's just checking for a blank password, so all he has to do is set up an array of ips to check and start forking off processes to check them, just do 135 in parrallel and you can scan them all within a second.
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It's good to be skeptical. But this guy clearly hacked into various US government organisations otherwise they wouldn't want him extradited.
2 3762628848 [google video] for info on another conspiracy theory (9/11).
For me three important things are thrown up by this case:
1. the incredibly harsh suggested punishment by the US govt. (60 years in jail)
2. the amazing lack of security at multiple us govt organisations
3. the broad dismissal of "conspiracy theories" as being fantastical (to use a Dane Cook-ism), before serious consideration
On the conspiracy theory point. People are free to form their own theories, such as this guy's that the US govt. is supressing alien technology, and these theories can actually be helpful in challenging governments where there might be a genuine public interest.
Take a look at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-82600599
My point is this: some (even most) conspiracy theories may be based on a misplaced sense of paranoia, but this doesn't mean that they can't raise valid questions that should be answered by the organisations concerned.
I'm pretty sure when he said hand, he meant cursor. It sounded to me like he was using a remote control application, in which case what he describes is perfectly plausible. It would have been v slow over 56k though.
On the wordpad conversation, in windows 98, you definitely could have a two way conversation with any text-editor you want.
We used to do it using the sub-seven trojan when i was at uni.
I havent looked into similar technology with windows xp, but no doubt it's possible.
He was (idiotically) using a VNC style remote administration program. It sends a jpeg stream of desktop screen captures and forwards your mouse movements/clicks. By "hand" he surely meant "cursor" which he could see move if somebody else touched the mouse. The WordPad conversation was possible simply because both parties were looking at and inputting to the same window.
polygraphs are worthless pseudocience, whose only merit is in their ability to trick the gullible into confessing. They can be trivially defeated, for example by tensing your anal sphincter during the control questions (the ones where they try to get you to lie), in order to set a high baseline.
If you had read or watched the interview you would know he was using the remote operating program RemoteAnywhere. In which case his story is totally consistent.
He states that the image was downloading when a staff member physically accessed the computer and disconnected him. I know personally the program can freeze for a couple of seconds on a slow connection while taking screen shots. It is therefor quite plausable that he was waiting for the image to download before taking the screenshot and then did not have time - in the few seconds it takes for a person to go the bottom-right-corner of the screen and select disconnect - to take a screenshot of what had already downloaded (as he would have had no indication of someone being about to use the computer locally). 1 frame later and any cache of the image would have been lost.
This doesn't at all prove his claim of viewing a NASA UFO image are true but they are atleast plausable.
Can someone show me a a Java VM that existed and would have been the programming language of choice in the "dial-up days"? At least to me the heyday of dialup was the late 80s to mid 90s, then cable and DSL started taking over. The first version of Java wasn't released until about '96 and wasn't widely deployed/accepted until 2000 or so.
HOW did he see a "guy's hand move" over a dial-up connection that was sending about 1 frame every 2 minutes at best?
Idiot. I'm guessing the interview was so short because the BBC interviewer smelled the BS.
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It is quite likely he was still on dial-up in the mid-90s. Broadband wasn't really widely available in the UK until a couple of years ago.
The rest of it does sound a bit suspect.
I'm still skeptical over his claims (is he being coerced to give the appearance that he's a bit of a nut? does he have a bit of an agenda? was he actually being manipulated at the time that he was hacking into NASA, or thought he was?), but you need to watch the video interview, not just read the transcript (which is quite badly edited imo)- it really isn't that short (actually over 16 mins long), and is quite clear that he's talking about the cursor moving across (not an actual hand), and that given he was viewing the remote desktop it was possible to use the wordpad to communicate with the person at the actual terminal (he seemed to find this amusing).
And 2000 - 2002 broadband was hardly available anywhere apart from central London and some metropolitan areas(satellite TV has always dominated, rather than cable TV, so the cable infrastructure is nothing like in the US, and British Telecom had previously held a monopoly over the telephone infrastructure, and was therefore ridiculously slow in updating local telephone exchanges to allow broadband); even where it was available, broadband was ridiculously expensive.
Nevertheless, I still think that what this guy is saying cannot be taken at face value.
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erewhon wrote: