Weapon of Mass Disruption
Posted on May 29th, 2009
by Freddy Gray |
|
Obama has announced that he will create a new “cybersecurity czar” to protect us all from hackers, identity fraud and online terrorism — or, as he put it, “weapons of mass disruption.” Fair enough. Yet will the appointee be able to affect the fate of poor Gary McKinnon — aka “the biggest military hacker in history” — an eccentric (to say it mildly) Briton who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems to look for evidence of extra-terrestrial life.
The US Justice Department is persisting in its ridiculous bid to extradite 43-year-old, so that they can put him on trail on charges of cyber-terrorism and have him banged up in jail for up to 70 years. The complicated legal attempt to do so has cost the US taxpayer millions of dollars.
Now, McKinnon is a strange fish — and nobody wants a situation in which any nerd with enough cyber savoir faire can break into sensitive government files — but he is certainly not a grave threat to national security. The attempt to make an example of him is a cruel waste of time and money - a weapon of mass disruption.
PS The video interview of McKinnon on the above link is weirdly interesting and enjoyable, not least because it seems to be set in the garden of a country pub.
Filed under: Uncategorized
He claims that he was not hacking, because he did not puta pass word in. Would that wash in an American court?
I see no mention will me made of the fact that there was little to no security on the systems this guy accessed. No restrictions placed upon incomming source addresses where used on the firewalls or the routers.
There where either no or default passwords used on the PC Anywhere package which McKinnon used to connect to the systems.
Instead of extraditing him to the US and treating him as if he is a terrorist. He should be treated as what he is somebody who wandered into a basically unprotected group of systems and made some governent organizations look bad.
Take him to court in the UK for what was done and let the punishment fit the crime.
However what action is being taken against the people where being paid to keep these systems secure? Surely they should be paying the price for their incompitance / lazyness ?
I hope he gets extradited asap so he can stand trial for what he done. I’m tired of all you whiny girls making excuses for his actions. He’s a criminal and he should face up to his actions. To make up any excuse to his crimes or to support the same is a pathetic attempt to dodge his punishment if found guilty. Pathetic are you also who support the blocking of his extradition, citing the USA as the big bad wolf. We sure don’t call the Americans names when they come & bail us out of the shit we seem to always get ourselves into. Makes me ashamed to be English when I read your comments.
Bob, do you even have a concept of what a mental disability is? The guy was naive, and so caught up in his obsession with UFOs that he crossed a line without realising the severity of what he was doing. He had no malicious intent, and I for one don’t even believe the claims that he brought down a large number of computers. I think he’s being turned into a scapegoat, and it’s a cruel and nasty thing to do to someone in his position.
In every other respect that I’ve become aware of, I’ve respected President Obama more and more - but I can’t respect his desire to destroy this poor man’s life and (metaphorically) stick his head on a spike for all to see. I really hoped that when he took over from Bush he would put an end to this petty situation. The computers were inadequately protected. If you’re going to prosecute anyone, prosecute the IT security staff.