All Intensive Purposes

. . . Gary McKinnon . . . is accused of causing £390,000 damage to Pentagon, army, navy and Nasa computer systems and is fighting extradition to the US where he faces up to 70 years in prison or even incarceration as a terrorist at the Guantánamo Bay. . . .

. . . infiltrating the Department of Defense computer systems in 2001 and 2002 required only a little ingenuity and patience, he says.

Essentially, Mr McKinnon scanned the US military computer systems for network administrator accounts where the password had been left blank.

. . . Once in control of such an account, Mr McKinnon could begin scanning every file and document on the network.

A bit of a sci-fi fan, he was looking for evidence of secret military technologies he thought the US might be developing, such as anti-gravity technology, as well as for evidence of UFOs. . . .

He never did find anything about anti-gravity but he did stumble on intriguing details on extra-terrestrial activity. Computers in Building 8 of the Johnson Space Center, for example, contained satellite pictures showing what looked like alien space ships. But Mr McKinnon never saw these as closely as he would have liked.

Before he could download them fully, someone on the space center computer system noticed the unauthorised access on the network and cut the connection. . . .

// posted by t.s. @ 5:55 AM