14 DAY TRIAL // Gary McKinnon had hacked into the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and NASA for two years until he was finally caught and arrested in the UK in 2002. Now he waits to see whether or not his country will extradite him to US where he faces 60 years in prison. He hopes to be trialed in Britain under the Computer Misuse Act.
McKinnon method of hacking was amazingly crude: he simply devised a Pearl program that tried out blank or default passwords. Apparently, the operators of high ranking computers didn't bother to change their passwords from the default ones! "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," he told to the BBC.
The BBC's Spencer Kelly has now interviewed him, asking him about what he has discovered on the NASA and the US military computers. McKinnon claims that NASA is covering up information about extraterrestrial technologies ranging from anti-gravity to free-energy and that the scientists even managed to reverse engineer it.
"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," he said.
He also said that NASA is digitally manipulating images in order to remove the evidences about UFOs.
At the end of the interview Spencer Kelly asked him what he thinks is a suitable punishment for what he did. "Firstly, because of what I was looking for, I think I was morally correct," said McKinnon. "Even though I regret it now, I think the free energy technology should be publicly available. I want to be tried in my own country, under the Computer Misuse Act, and I want evidence brought forward, or at least want the Americans to have to provide evidence in order to extradite me, because I know there is no evidence of damage."