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."

Comments

I'm really skeptical

[suso]

No, the graphical remote viewer works frame by frame. It's a Java application, so there's nothing to save on your hard drive, or at least if it is, only one frame at a time.

What kind of moron spends 3 years breaking into government computers and doesn't know how to do a screen capture or see the importance of saving what he's doing. Sorry folks, but from reading this interview, he seems like bullshit.

Re:I'm really skeptical

[Threni]

> from reading this interview, he seems like bullshit

He wants to seem like a hapless guy who got lucky but didn't know what he's doing. (All that stuff about a shadow of some guys hand as he stopped the download, and altering jpegs to 4bit mode as they downloaded etc are part of it. Oh, and since when was Wordpad an IM tool?) Either that or he's taking the blame for someone else. There's definitely something odd going on.

Re:I'm really skeptical

[DrXym]

This seems par for the course for UFO nuts. When pressed for hard evidence of the amazing things they claim, you get a bunch of excuses or some grainy blurry mess that could be and probably is a hubcap or a spray painted flower pot. In this idiot's case he has no excuse for not providing evidence. If he really saw these super secret UFOs, free energy devices etc, all he had to do was save / download the information and stash it somewhere.

Since he didn't he is full of shit. The UFO / conspiracy nuts will probably love him.

Re:I'm really skeptical

[malsdavis]

The British police (as with the American authorities) would probably only have access to connection details, not data transferred. It was those very details which were reportably used to trace him.

I've heard of this guy

[DerGeist]

He apparently got ahold of tons of super-secret information and mentions just enough in interviews to sound like a movie trailer, but when pressed for details he just contemptuously laughs and says something vague like "oh, the time is not right yet.."

Does he really know anything interesting or did he just find a bunch of documents on how a missile works?

Re:I've heard of this guy

[Kandenshi]

"have blank administrator passwords."

I certainly expect/hope they've been changed to something slightly better than that now that it's getting press...
Hopefully more accurate to say "had blank administrator passwords."

Now, I'm not as techy as most /.ers, but why would you have stuff that's as secret as free energy and aliens and whatnot on a machine that's connected to the internet? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep that sort of information on a network that has no physical connection to the net? Something where you have to actually physically gain access to a computer on the network to see the information?

UFO Vs Alien & Gary's Flakey Story

[eldavojohn]

I'm going to throw out this warning that this article was not fairly summarized by Slashdot.

I will preemptively state that UFO does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial technology or not from this planet. In the raw form of the acronym, it means simple that there is an Unidentified Flying Object. There are most likely hundreds of types of aircraft that governments around the world would refuse to classify due to a need to keep their enemies in the dark (national security).

From the article:

Gary McKinnon: I was in search of suppressed technology, laughingly referred to as UFO technology. I think it's the biggest kept secret in the world because of its comic value, but it's a very important thing.

He interchangeably uses "suppressed technology" with "UFO technology." I'm certain the United States Government has tons of suppressed technology as well as any other government for obvious reasons.

I should finish the quote, however:

Old-age pensioners can't pay their fuel bills, countries are invaded to award oil contracts to the West, and meanwhile secretive parts of the secret government are sitting on suppressed technology for free energy.

Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job. And then there's also this:

I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.

But what came on to the screen was amazing. It was a culmination of all my efforts. It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made.

Yeah, Gary, it sure is crazy how you can mess with the color quality and resolution of an image to make it look like my family picture is really some image a green gelatinous blob that eats people.

Firstly, because of what I was looking for, I think I was morally correct. Even though I regret it now, I think the free energy technology should be publicly available.

Uh, I only heard a story about a blimp above the earth's atmosphere. Where was the story where you saw a device that produced unlimited amounts of energy?

"In my house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer Simpson

Can't get to story.

[dietrollemdefender]

But from reading the summary, he just uncovered sloppy security - breaking in using default passwords?!?

The other thing is about the "airbrushing UFOs out of photos.."

A UFO could be anything - Unidentified Flying Object - doesn't mean flying saucer from the planet Krypton. AND...if there really was flying saucers from Krypton out there, who's keeping the Europeans, Chinese, Russians, etc... from publishing those photos...

I agree with previous posters - BS.

The guy's trying to make a living on the talk-show circuit - somehow. Is there a way of finding out if he's being compensated for these "interviews"?

Ufos? not really...

[Captain Perspicuous]

The last time he was interviewed, he said he didn't find any real proof for UFOs, just a file for "non-earth-based marines" (or something of that sort, it's been a year since I heard it). And now he suddenly has more info? This sounds to me like he's running out of money and tries to sell a story.

Please stop hijacking the "energy conspiracy"!

[Zaphod2016]

I for one am getting sick and tired of various nutjobs, scoundrels and losers latching onto the "energy conspiracy" bandwagon in order to justify stupidity.

I've never met a hacker unable to grab an image- be it from cache or screenshot. This guy is full of shit, and looking for sympathy. Period.

However: despite these loons, there *is* a very real "energy conspiracy". And guess what? It doesn't involve alien races or secret technology, it involves PLANTS (ya know, grow from dirt, rather cheap and eco-friendly).

Biodiesel. Hemp. There ARE solutions. There ARE forces holding back progress.

And every time a fool like this "latches on" to "the cause" it hurts the credibility of some wonderful people who are are trying against all odds to save us from ourselves.

maybe the dude at nasa

[maynard]

was just fucking with him - trolling a hacker for laughs. Then it hits the press and NASA has a public relations problem on its hands. whoops.

Honestly...

[Valdrax]

Anyone who thinks that the US government is sitting on technology that would give us greater air superiority in combat, make exploration and military domination of space easy, eliminate a significant portion of our trade deficit, make us no longer beholden to countries like Iran, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, etc., etc. is a complete and total lunatic.

If we had alien technology, had reverse engineered it, and knew how to make it work, we would be using it right now.

Re:Honestly...

[Valdrax]

See my reply to the other guy. Please explain what rational motive would lead the government to hide technology that could solve several major US policy goals and that would give us even more military superiority when the Pentagon is never satisfied with what they have already. Despite the abundant benefits of openly using the technology, your excuse must provide a good reason why hiding it has more benefits, especially as our economic leadership is starting to decay.

Re:Honestly...

[lawpoop]

The international wealthy have their wealth invested in the current petroleum based economy. If there really is a viable new technology, or one comes around, they would do everything they can to prevent it from getting a foothold and stopping the profit from the petroleum economy. They have made the investment in oil, and they have no interest in suddenly not making a profit off of it. We will be using oil, and they will be profitting from it, until the very last drop is used up. There's no sense in them throwing away their investment. Once the oil is all used up, and all the profit has been made from the investment in oil, then, and only then, will they change.

These international cartels don't care about middle classes, poor people, political stability, or any country in particular. In fact, it's easier to make money in collapsed, unstable countries with corrupt politicians. There are no pesky laws, labor unions, middle class, or people's champion politicians getting in the way of profits.

If war breaks out in the Congo, they can raise prices in response. Unstable markets mean windfall profits with little accountability. If there is a steady, consistent stream of product and revenue, people start getting suspicious about profitability and start wanting to audit the books. They want to get paid more for working in the fields, and politicians start wanting to tax the profitability of the oil. It's bad for business.

65000 passwords in 8 minutes?

[sl4shd0rk]

"I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes."

65000/8 = 8125 per min.
8125/60 = 135 per sec.

Dunno about that. Just the time it takes to bring up a socket and get some syn/ack going chews up a good portion of a second. Maybe he was searching a local password database.

Re:65000 passwords in 8 minutes?

[vidarlo]

"I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes." 65000/8 = 8125 per min. 8125/60 = 135 per sec. Dunno about that. Just the time it takes to bring up a socket and get some syn/ack going chews up a good portion of a second. Maybe he was searching a local password database.

In the TFA he says he was on a 56K dial-up link...Say each machine sends a 25 byte login string, you send a 20byte login credentials, they send 50 byte denials. That is around 100 bytes pr machine, in a theoretical minimum (overhead for TCP/IP - telnet handshakes and such makes it probably three times as much). So 135 machines would mean 135*100bytes=13.5kB/sec. 56K modem has 33.6kb upload speed, so he could send 4kB/sec at optimal. So he is clearly a nutjob.

Re:65000 passwords in 8 minutes?

[Quixote]

The Perl script need not run on his machine. He could have logged into a machine inside the network, and then run this script against the other machines on the network.

Conspiracy

[kakapo]

The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??

Apple can't keep the date they launch new computers secret (next Tuesday for the next batch intel powerbooks, by all accounts). And that is a secret with a finite lifetime (three months ago not even Steve Jobs knew the date -- a week from now everyone will know it).

The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.

Remember this giant conspiracy is brought to you by the same people who run FEMA and promote "absitence only" sex education as a solution to teen pregnancy. But somehow the conspiracy works well until some script kiddie breaks into NASA over a dialup line (you plan to find free energy devices that will change the face of civilization, and you can't spring for DSL??) and you find that all these "secrets" are protected by default passwords. This guy presumably did hack into NASA, but the rest of it crap -- he is either nuts, or hoping that the Feds will decide it isn't worth the bother to have the guy spouting this nonsense on the stand.

Re:Conspiracy

[asuffield]

The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??


Such a conspiracy would work by publishing the broad scope of what's going on, with a few errors added, as fiction. And also publishing a lot of other related, fictional ideas with the same premise. That way it's still effectively secret - you'll never know which one of the X-Files episodes was a true story - and anybody who tries to blow the whistle will be treated like a conspiracy nut and ignored, because everybody already thinks of that as fiction.

It's an insidious idea and it would probably work. Our abilities to falsify images, documents, videos, and even reality (to some extent) have grown so effective that it's no longer possible to prove that aliens exist: even if I brought a live talking mollusc over to your house, you'd get on slashdot and post about three different ways that could have been faked.

The simple fact is that people believe what TV tells them to believe, and TV tells them that people who believe in UFOs and aliens are crazy conspiracy nuts. We will probably never know whether or not this is actually true; the subject has become so obscured that truth is most likely unobtainable at this point.

So, yes, there could be a conspiracy going back 30 years with thousands of people in the know. No, I'm not saying that it wouldn't have leaked by now. I'm saying that if there was a conspiracy, the mere fact that we're talking about it indicates that it has already leaked, and the leaks have been ignored by the public because most of them didn't believe any of it. This should not seem unreasonable to you, because there are hundreds of subjects which involve information, of interest to the general public, which is only known by a group of a few thousand individuals simply because the rest are too stupid to understand it, or because TV told them it wasn't true. Subjects like medicine, biology, physics, statistics, and most other technically inclined disciplines are full of such things. It is a very small step to move from this to outright secrecy, when the populace at large would neither believe or understand the information that is being kept secret.

Whether or not that has actually happened? Well, I've just spent ten minutes explaining why you'll never get a useful answer to that. For practical purposes, it is unlikely that it will ever matter to your life in any way (regardless of what the answer is), and that's probably more important.

Re:Conspiracy

[Paladin144]

The thing that always surprises me about these Giant Conspiracy nutjobs is that they never really ask themselves how such a conspiracy would *work*. There must be thousands of people in the know, going back for at least 30 years -- and they really think this wouldn't have leaked by now??

Works pretty well, I'd say. If somebody ever comes out and starts telling secrets, they are immediately branded a "giant conspiracy nutjob." And after that.... and after that nothing. Nobody pays attention to them any more. Case closed. I wonder how many of the people who screamed "nutjob" had even finished reading the article before they made up their mind. I wonder how many have done any serious research into the matter.

I'm not saying this guy is for real. You'd think he'd get something better than dialup if this is his obsession. But to claim that a massive conspiracy couldn't work is just ludicrous. It's all about getting people to play along, while compartmentalizing knowledge. It's possible nobody really knows all the big secrets out there. So then is it really even a conspiracy? Sounds more like it's just our fucked up world, where everyone thinks he knows everything.

The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.

The NSA has been listening to domestic calls for over 30 years. Get a clue. Read some of my older posts for more information on this. It's people like you who make "conspiracy" possible, because you don't question what leaders tell you. The reason why nobody is too shocked about Bush's international call spying is because most people of power in Washington know that the NSA has been monitoring domestic calls for decades. It's really not that big of a deal. But you can't talk about it in polite company without being branded a nutjob, no matter how many facts are on your side.

You're not one of those people who doesn't believe in any conspiracies, are you? There are folks out there who reject the very idea of a conspiracy, saying that it has never happened, in all of human history - EVER....And people say conspiracy "theorists" are the nutjobs. sheesh. The whole coincidence theory crowd actually just makes the conspiracy theorist crowd more paranoid because it leads them to believe that everyone has been brainwashed. In a way, I suppose, it's true.

Conspiracies can be very benign and very mundane. For instance, I am party to a secret conspiracy to fool people worldwide. I bet you are, too. It involves telling children that a fat guy in a red suit flies around the planet delivering presents to the entire world in just 24 hours. That's right: Santa Claus. Have you ever really wondered why we tell our children such ridiculous lies? And the creepy thing is that every adult is in on the conspiracy. How can it be possible that we are all a party to this vast conspiracy? What do we even have to gain from it?

The weird thing is, if you dare to tell a child the truth, their parents will get upset at you! It's insane. I met a guy recently who admitted he believed in Santa until he was 16 years old. And somebody had to tell him! He was devastated! Now, if this guy tells me there's no such thing as UFOs, should I believe him? Personally, I was rigging boobytraps for Santa by the time I was 6 or 7 years old.

My point is, don't be so sure that our leaders are telling the truth. Sometimes people -- no, whole cultures lie, for no good reason. That doesn't mean Gary McKinnon isn't full of shit, but it's impossible to know for sure. There is certainly more to our world than meets the eye.

Re:"Saw the guy's hand move across the screen"

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, the guy could also just be full of shit.

Re:I BELIEVE HIM

[antispam_ben]

Free Energy is the death blow to the entire class/economic system that keeps most of the world enslaved to 12 families.

I've heard this tune before...

http://www.songcity.co.uk/WeAreNotAlone.htm
http://www.songcity.co.uk/Demos/DavidIcke/WeAreNot Alone.mp3

Free Energy is the death blow to the entire class/economic system that keeps most of the world enslaved to 12 families. If we all had access to Free Energy, no one would have to "Earn a Living", we would just live (imagine that).

You mean to say that not only would my electric bill go to zero, but so would my rent and groceries? Wow, this REALLY IS some sort of suppressed, secret economic technology!

Re:UFOs, free energy, and anti-gravity?

[nozzo]

sniff sniff - it does smell like BS. So, first he says he reduces the image to 4-bit color and turn the resolution very low - then states he didn't see rivets or seams. Well, WTF did he expect to see? Prolly a big grey blob next to a greeny/blue blob then made the big leap and came up with UFO! Well excuse me for been sceptical. Court case? Circus more like :-D

100 MPG carburetors, the Cold War, etc.

[Valdrax]

The international wealthy have their wealth invested in the current petroleum based economy. If there really is a viable new technology, or one comes around, they would do everything they can to prevent it from getting a foothold and stopping the profit from the petroleum economy.

Yeah, yeah, and the oil industry is hiding the 100 MPG carburetor and a car that can run on water.

You know what? A little over 100 years ago, all the weatlhiest Americans and international investors had their money invested in railroads and related industries. The railroad was obsoleted for travel and for light shipping by the automobile and the airplane. The descendents of the people who were rich back then are still rich now.

I don't buy the argument that the oil companies could prevent such technology from being found out about or that their investors would be all that interested in stopping it instead of getting all their money into it first or at least into other lucrative industries. Why do you think Bill Gates diversified his portfolio years ago?

We've had many Presidents who were boosters of the space program or at least of our ICBM program during the Cold War. Had we a cheap way of getting to space based on alien technology, then why the hell would we waste all that money on chemical rockets when the life of the nation was on the line in nuclear detente? We could've dominated space over the Soviet Union with a fleet of craft, knocked nukes out of orbit on launch, and pretty much won the Cold War as a conventional war without all of the fuss.

Face it, Occam's Razor demands that the most simple explanation (that we don't have the technology) should be listened to over the theory that we have all the technology but the world hasn't been shaped by it because of a coalltion of people working for interests that don't match the public interests they should have.