Gary McKinnon,
also known as Solo (born February 10, 1966), is a Scottish hacker facing extradition to the United States to face charges of perpetrating what has been described by one prosecutor as the "biggest military computer hack of all time."[1] Following legal hearings in the UK it was decided in July 2006 that he should be extradited to the US. In February 2007 his lawyers argued against the ruling in an appeal to the High Court in London,[2] which was turned down on April 3.[3] On July 30, 2007 the House of Lords agreed to hear the appeal[4] and on June 17, 2008 the Law Lords began hearing the case.[5][6] This Judgment was delivered on July 30, 2008 with the Law Lords judging that Gary McKinnon could be extradited to the United States.[7] He was given two weeks to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights before extradition, but the Court halted the extradition for an additional two weeks to allow time to hear his appeal on August 28,[8] which was subsequently rejected.[9][10] His legal team subsequently decided to lodge another appeal, which was granted, based on the fact that McKinnon has recently been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.[11][12] His diagnosis was made in August 2008 by the eminent psychologist Prof Simon Baron-Cohen.[13]

The Glasgow-born systems administrator who attended Highgate Wood Secondary School in north London, is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force. The US estimates claim the costs of tracking and correcting the problems he allegedly caused were around $700,000[14] but he has always denied causing any damage, argued he accessed open, unsecured machines, and disputes the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offense. While it did not constitute evidence of destruction, he did admit leaving a diatribe on one computer:

US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days... It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year... I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels. [14]

McKinnon was originally tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2002 who informed him that he would face community service. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to charge him. Later that year he was indicted by the United States government. McKinnon remained at liberty without restriction for three years until June 2005 (after the UK had implemented a new extradition treaty with the US) when he became subject to bail conditions including a requirement to sign in at his local police station every evening, and to remain at his home address at night. In addition, he was banned from using a computer with access to the Internet. There have been no more developments in respect of the charges relating to United Kingdom legislation but in late 2005 the United States began extradition proceedings.

If he is extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon faces up to 70[15] years in jail and has expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.[16][17] He continues to contest the extradition proceedings and believes that he should face trial in the UK, principally as he argues that the destruction allegations are fraudulent and that any alleged crimes were committed there and not in the United States.

Appeal

Representing McKinnon in the House of Lords on 16 June 2008, David Pannick QC told the Law Lords that the prosecutors had said McKinnon faced a possible 8-10 years in jail if he contested the charges (there were seven counts), but only 37-46 months if he co-operated and went voluntarily to the US. McKinnon also claimed that he had been told that he could serve part of his sentence in the UK if he co-operated. He had rejected the plea bargain offer as no guarantee had been given by the Americans.

Pannick said that the Law Lords could deny extradition if there was an abuse of process: "If the United States wish to use the processes of English courts to secure the extradition of an alleged offender, then they must play by our rules."[18] The House of Lords rejected this argument, with the lead judgement (of Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood) holding that extradition proceedings should "accommodate legal and cultural differences between the legal systems of the many foreign friendly states with whom the UK has entered into reciprocal extradition arrangements".[19] McKinnon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights,[7] but the appeal was rejected.

On 23 January 2009, McKinnon won permission from the High Court to apply for a judicial review against his extradition. ..[20]

Civilian efforts in support of McKinnon

In early November 2008, a total of 80 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for any custodial sentence imposed by an American court to be served in a prison in the UK.[21]

In mid-November the rock group Marillion announced that it was ready to participate in a benefit concert in support of Gary McKinnon's struggle to avoid extradition to United States. Organiser of the planned event Ross Hemsworth, an English radio host, has also inquired such names as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd,[22] The Rolling Stones, U2 and David Bowie. No date has been set yet.[23] Many have now voiced their support [24] including Sting, Trudy Styler, Julie Christie, David Gilmour, Graham Nash, Boris Johnson (mayor of London), Terry Waite, Tony Benn, Chris Huhne, Lord Carlile, the Liberal Democrat Party, the Green Party, the National Autistic Society, Liberty and many, many others. All of whom demand that, at the very least, he be tried in the UK.

In a major Op/Ed in The Herald newspaper of Scotland Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr.,a retired NASA Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent, joined the chorus of support for Gary McKinnon. Gutheinz, who is also an American criminal defense attorney and former Member of the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments, opined that Gary McKinnon could not find justice if extradited to America from England, because of America’s poor track record in choosing to aggressively prosecute offenders with mental impairments. Gutheinz was especially concerned that McKinnon affliction with Asperger's syndrome would not be dealt with sympathetically by the American criminal justice system. Gutheinz said, that as an attorney, he represented a young defendant with Asperger's syndrome in the past, in an American criminal case. [25] [26]

Statements to the media

During the length of time between his indictment and beginning of extradition proceedings, with a growing media interest in his case, Gary McKinnon has had a number of opportunities to address the media.

In an interview televised on the BBC's Click programme,[27] he claimed that he was able to get into the military's networks simply by using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords; in other words his report suggests that there were computers on these networks with the default passwords active.

At the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference in London on April 27, 2006, McKinnon appeared on the Hackers' Panel. When asked how his exploits were first discovered, McKinnon answered that he had miscalculated the timezone — he was using remote-control software to operate a Windows computer while its user was sitting in front of it.

McKinnon has admitted in many public statements to unauthorised access of computer systems in the United States including those mentioned in the United States indictment. He claims his motivation, drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on May 9, 2001 by the "The Disclosure Project", was to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and the suppression of "Free Energy", all of which he claims to have proven through his actions.[28]

In his interview with the BBC he also claimed that "The Disclosure Project" says there is "extraterrestrial in origin and [they've] captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it." He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert's claim that at the Johnson Space Center's Building 8 images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this comparing the raw originals with the "processed" images. He claimed to have viewed a detailed image of "something not man-made" and "cigar shaped" floating above the northern hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted owing to the hour, he did not think of capturing the image because he was "bedazzled", and therefore did not think of securing it with the screen capture function in the software RemotelyAnywhere at the point when his connection was interrupted.[29] McKinnon stated the image was approximately 256 megabytes in size, yet that the craft's details were still distinct in the greatly inferior 4-bit color and low resolution he had to reduce the viewing image to appear across his mere 56k modem connection (approximate transfer rate 5 minutes/megabyte).

The charge that he perpetrated "the biggest military hack of all time" is ridiculed by McKinnon who characterises himself as a "bumbling computer nerd" who undestructively accessed open, unsecured machines while under the influence of cannabis and beer, and that the destruction claims were manufactured by embarrassed US authorities after the fact in order to meet a dollar amount requisite to seek an extradition, in order to make him a poster child and intimidate any snoopers, especially those interested in the alien technology subjects he believed the public had a moral right to be aware of. He contrasted his viewing of unsecured information with incidents of real, non-passive security-disrupting or destructive cracking, including when in May 2001 as acknowledged by U.S. government contractor Exigent International one or more hackers broke into a U.S. government server storing satellite software and stole code. Evidence in that case led investigators to an e-mail service in Sweden but the culprits were never apprehended. In 1997, two California teenagers and a trio of Israeli hackers were arrested for cracking into Pentagon servers. Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum, then 18 years old, and his two teenage accomplices were not extradited, but were prosecuted by local authorities. McKinnon stated that on many occasions he noticed numerous other users from various global IP addresses accessing the same machines at the same time. The U.S. Pentagon has for example in the past cited as many as 250,000 hostile attacks in a single year.Several Britons have been prosecuted under UK law for hacking into U.S. computer systems. Teenage hacker Aaron Caffrey, who also has Asperger's Syndrome, was blamed for causing the biggest systems crash to hit the U.S. The jury cleared him of any wrongdoing after accepting his claim that unknown computer users had hijacked his machine, using it as a 'Trojan Horse' to stage the attack. According to the Americans, brilliant young music student Richard Pryce was 'doing more harm than the KGB' and dubbed the 'No 1 threat to U.S. security'. In 1997 Bow Street magistrates fined the 19-year-old £1,200 after he admitted 12 offences in what his lawyer described as 'a schoolboy prank'. Matthew Bevan was accused by the U.S. Air Force of posing a threat to national security after hacking into research files. Andrew Harvey and Jordan Bradley were part of an Anglo-American hacking group that set out to cause worldwide chaos by infiltrating home computers. All were tried in the UK and no request for their extradition was made.[30]

The British tabloid The Daily Mail has started a campaign to prevent Gary McKinnon's extradition to the U.S.[31]

NASA documents

In 2006, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed to NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon. NASA's documents consisted of printed news articles from the Slashdot website, but no other related documents. This is consistent with NASA employees browsing internet articles about Gary McKinnon, the records of which are public domain.

The records have been uploaded to the internet for review, and can be downloaded from theblackvault.com.

Freedom to Gary..