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Gary Mckinnon Hero or Villian you chose

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Kieran

Kieran

Paranormal Adept
Gary mckinnon probably is going to be extradite to the United States for biggest hack of the modern era . Sixty years he could get if convicted why is this man so important to the states was the information so secret that they need to known what he saw relateing to the ufo subject or is it a matter of him hacking into the computer's of Nasa pentagon,army and the navy that pisses off the American goverment :confused:
 
Irishseekers said:
Gary mckinnon probably is going to be extradite to the United States for biggest hack of the modern era . Sixty years he could get if convicted why is this man so important to the states was the information so secret that they need to known what he saw relateing to the ufo subject or is it a matter of him hacking into the computer's of Nasa pentagon,army and the navy that pisses off the American goverment :confused:
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He's not the only one who has done that sort of thing. Strange that he's singled out. There are worse offenders out there.
 
Definately Gene it is a strange one, poor bloke if he gets prison not a place for the fainted hearted:exclamation:
 
His story is well worth researching! He may very well have uncovered a secret arm of our defense forces.A space based navy so to speak.Recent activity involving another guy using an almost zero point paralax on his telescope seems to confirm this.With shots of "other"space craft as large or larger than the space station bieng built.It would go a long way to explaining why he's bieng singled out if he kicked over a "black ops" secret and broght it to the light of day!:D
 
Seriously, what this guy did was use a precursor to "Goto My PC" to login to PeeCees that had *NO* security. Once in, he could bounce around to other PeeCees with *NO* security. -- Is that correct ? That's what I read based on the available information out there.

The government should have been running OS X. Maybe this is why the navy is throwing their Windows PCs overboard for Mac.
 
Apparently, Mr Mckinnon was using a high level language called Perl to search computers that did not have passwords set; that's what I've read.
The U.S. government originally offered a plea bargain whereby he would get three to four years in jail if he pleaded guilty. Since this offer was not taken up they have changed their minds.
It is ridiculous that they should want to come down on such a person so harshly; he claims he did no damage and he even left messages stating that their security was "crap". He also left a message calling the U.S. government terrorists.
He has not, therefore, behaved like an arch criminal would being, in fact, a definite amateur; he became careless and, possibly, obsessive. I hope that he does not have to pay too high a price for his actions.
He claims that he discovered a NASA document which basically said that they were airbrushing UFOs from satellite photos because there were so many of them(UFOs).
 
I read this morning that Mr McKinnon is taking his appeal to the European Court of human rights after our own dear, gutless "New" Labour government-influenced-judiciary decided to hand his arse to the Texan red-neck lunatics in America who want to see him, and I quote, "fry" in some Gitmo hell.
McKinnons European appeal could take up to two years. If that fails, I hope he's put on suicide watch because I know what I'd do.

Yes, he did wrong. Yes, he should be punished. But his crime must be contextualised and his sentence must be proportionate and fair.

Interestingly, the paper (The Guardian) said nothing about the tantalising UFO related things McKinnon claims to have seen online. Quel surprise!
 
I see him as neither. If an idiot was an option, I'd pick that. Hacking with dial up, and wasn't prepared to gather evidence, yet takes the risk? Oooook. This assumes he really was after ufo stuff of course, and much of what he's stated is true. I still have my doubts.
 
Paranormal Packrat said:
I see him as neither. If an idiot was an option, I'd pick that. Hacking with dial up, and wasn't prepared to gather evidence, yet takes the risk? Oooook. This assumes he really was after ufo stuff of course, and much of what he's stated is true. I still have my doubts.
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Lets be clear. He was NOT a hacker. He simply ran a port scanner to identify open ports and IP addresses on a network and a pearl script to search for systems with no password on the admin account. Once he had logged these, he simply logged in one by one and used a VNC remote desktop-esque program to visually see the desktop. There was no security hacking involved.

Perl is not a high level language. It is a scripting language. It is mostly dying as PHP is dominating its old fan base, but it is a very easy language to learn. There was nothing technically difficult behind what he did. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can downloand these same tools for free all over the internet. If anyone should be crucified on this, they should start with the so called system administrators and security specialists.

I believe his story. I thknk he did access systems and walk away with knowledge he shouldnt have been able to get. It is no different then most large corporations out there today. Small mistakes by underpaid and underqualified folks can turn into massive security breakdowns. (Recently, there is at least one bank that wishes it had locked things down a bit more.) Couple that with the swiss cheese that is Windows security and you have a recipe for this very thing happening. Was he unprepared... yes, but broadband wasnt the norm then and he was really looking for documents, not images. Plus, 56k draws smaller bandwidth and is less likely to set off alarms. But, that is just my opinion.
 
We're supposed to believe this clown, who risked great personal danger by breaking the law with his "search for evidence of ET life", can't pull a simple screen-cap when he finds the evidence?

LOL!

PT Barnum already covered this one so I'll let it ride.
 
Lets be clear. He was NOT a hacker. He simply ran a port scanner to identify open ports and IP addresses on a network and a pearl script to search for systems with no password on the admin account.
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I consider that a hacker. But I admit I know nothing about such things.



Welcome back Dbtrek. Where you been?
 
Paranormal Packrat said:
I consider that a hacker. But I admit I know nothing about such things.
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I think it safely falls under 'hacker' as well, though the argument could be made for the less-glorious title of script-kiddie. Not to nit-pick Ron, but the language is PERL, not "pearl".

Welcome back Dbtrek. Where you been?
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I quit smoking weed, and the show became less entertaining . . . what can I say? :D:p:D

. . . actually, I've just been in to other things. The same paranormal dead horses can only be flogged so many times. Eventually you've heard pretty much all the variations of all the major paranormal events. Until more evidence shows up on some paranormal topic I don't really have much to add to the conversation . . . other than my usual backhanded commentary.
 
DBTrek said:
We're supposed to believe this clown, who risked great personal danger by breaking the law with his "search for evidence of ET life", can't pull a simple screen-cap when he finds the evidence?

LOL!

PT Barnum already covered this one so I'll let it ride.
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Alas, bad decisions leading to worse outcomes.

Hope that his trail is fair and any judgement proportional.
 
knichol5 said:
Alas, bad decisions leading to worse outcomes.

Hope that his trail is fair and any judgement proportional.
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I hope so too.

He'd better not try to tell his "I was looking for aliens and found them! But I . . .uh . . . didn't screen cap the evidence . . . or pull it from my temp files/cache . . . or have any way of preserving this information I was supposedly so desperately seeking" story to the judge. Judges don't like it when you try to treat them like idiots.

Hopefully the guy will just say "Sorry . . . I wanted to see if it could be hacked . . . and it can. Who knew? My bad."

It doesn't seem that he actually hurt anyone or anything, so I imagine he'll be ok.
 
Gary Mckinnon Hero or Villain you chose

I suspect the US authorities are coming down hard on this guy to make an example of him. Dealing with him harshly may act as a deterrent to others planning similar ventures. The harsh approach could also be punitive. After all, he did embarrass the government by accessing their computers, and showing the world how paltry their security was. It may or may not have something to do with what he uncovered, but my personal suspicion is that the US authorities are simply pissed at him for showing them up, and exposing the vulnerabilities of their IT systems.
 
Gary Mckinnon Hero or Villain you chose

Siani said:
I suspect the US authorities are coming down hard on this guy to make an example of him. Dealing with him harshly may act as a deterrent to others planning similar ventures. The harsh approach could also be punitive. After all, he did embarrass the government by accessing their computers, and showing the world how paltry their security was. It may or may not have something to do with what he uncovered, but my personal suspicion is that the US authorities are simply pissed at him for showing them up, and exposing the vulnerabilities of their IT systems.
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But they aren't making a bg deal of it. Th Department of Justice last updated their Mckinnon page in 2002.

The indictment claims, "Gary McKinnon scanned a large number of computers in the .mil network, was able to access the computers and obtained administrative privileges. Once he was able to access the computers, McKinnon installed a remote administration tool, a number of hacker tools, copied password files and other files, deleted a number of user accounts and deleted critical system files. Once inside a network, McKinnon would then use the hacked computer to find additional military and NASA victims. Ultimately, McKinnon caused a network in the Washington D.C. area to shutdown, resulting in the total loss of Internet access and e-mail service to approximately 2000 users for three days. The estimated loss to the various military organizations, NASA and the private businesses is approximately $900,000"
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/mckinnonIndict.htm
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/mckinnonIndict2.htm

These pages were the last mention of him on their site. I'll bet they keep this as quiet in the US as possible.
 
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