Gary McKinnon: Pentagon hacker's worst nightmare comes true

For the past seven years, in bedsits in Crouch End and Bounds Green, north London, the Pentagon hacker and UFO buff Gary McKinnon has – according to his family and friends – been suffering one long anxiety attack. He's prone to regular fits of fainting and thoughts of suicide. He's written that he can't look himself in his eyes when he's shaving in case the sight of himself sets the spiral off. He jumps out of his skin if someone touches him by surprise. I've met him sporadically during these years and can vouch that he's a chainsmoking, terrified shell.

"I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control my own legs," he has told me. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking about jail. About male rape. An American jail. I'm only a little nerd … My life is like walking through a world you know is probably going to end."

And yesterday, at 10am, it did. The high court ruled that extradition to America was "a lawful and proportionate response to Gary McKinnon's offending". It is unlikely that anything will stop it now. How did he become, in the eyes of US prosecutors, the man who committed "the biggest US military hack of all time"? And does he deserve his fate?

He was born in Glasgow in 1966, but grew up in London with his mother Janis and stepfather Wilson, a UFO fan. Wilson would spellbind Gary with stories of cigar-shaped objects floating over Bonnybridge, near Falkirk. Entranced, the teenage Gary joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association. But he found the paranormal buffs who gathered there to be fainthearted hobbyists not interested in accumulating hardcore evidence. McKinnon was more earnest than that. He was especially intrigued by the question of how UFOs were fuelled. It seemed obvious to him they couldn't run on oil, because no oil tank could ever be big enough to get them across galaxies. So, he concluded, the extraterrestrials must have invented some kind of advanced, clean energy. And the US surely knew about it. They must have dissected crashed ET craft and learnt how to build their own oil-free vehicles. The thought of this incensed McKinnon as he sat in his new girlfriend's aunt's basement flat in Crouch End.

"We're having wars over oil," he told a journalist from the UFO group Project Camelot in 2006. "We're burning fossil fuels. Pensioners are dying in Britain because they can't afford to heat themselves. So why on earth is this technology being sat on?"

There was only one possible explanation: US government scientists were suppressing the information because they were in the pockets of evil oil conglomerates. Why were journalists not doggedly pursuing this important story? Well, McKinnon decided sometime in 1995, he'd take the initiative. Perceiving it to be a brave form of citizen journalism, he brought a copy of The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall, quit his job as a hairdresser, and began to hack.

"The real difference between me and journalists like you," he told me during our first meeting in 2003, "is that people like you are invited."

Gary McKinnon, being a loner and a techie since childhood, discovered the internet before most people did. The writer Dan Gillmor has termed these early pioneers "the former audience" and because they were just working out how to behave in this new world, and because the boundaries were undefined, and they felt immortal in the seclusion of their homes, their actions sometimes descended into irresponsible craziness. McKinnon's craziness manifested itself in obsessive hacking. With a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mousepad, he hacked Nasa, the Pentagon, and every US military installation he could get into. It was, he says, incredibly easy. He wrote a script that searched for network administrators who'd been too lazy to change their user names from "user name" and their passwords from "password". And when he found one he was in. He stopped washing and going out. His girlfriend dumped him and a new man moved in "because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn't have a job. We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you've split up? It's bad."

His testimony offers a compelling argument against conspiracy theories. He spent between five and seven years roaming the corridors of power like the Invisible Man, wandering into Pentagon offices, rifling through files, and he found no particular smoking gun about anything. He unearthed nothing to suggest a US involvement in 9/11, nothing to suggest a UFO cover-up. Nothing, he told me, except two things.

"I found a list of officers' names," he said during our first meeting in 2003, "under the heading "Non-Terrestrial Officers". I looked it up and it's nowhere. I don't think it means little green men. What I think it means is not Earth-based. What I saw made me believe that they have some kind of spaceship, off planet."

"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?" I asked.

"I guess so," said McKinnon. "But I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

The other thing he said he saw towards the end of his hacking adventures – in the final days before the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit swooped – was a photograph of a smooth, spherical object in a file at the Johnson Space Centre that "might have been a UFO but was probably a satellite".

He was arrested in November 2002. US prosecutors had identified him because he'd used his own email address to download a program called RemotelyAnywhere. But it was inevitable because he was sloppy and "not a secretive, sophisticated, checking-myself-every step-of-the-way type of hacker".

The arrest was a relief to him at first. It had – he recognised – been getting out of control. He'd become megalomaniacal, leaving little calling cards like Raffles the gentleman thief, although in his case the calling cards were not in the form of a monogrammed glove but a political diatribe on an instant message wordpad that would suddenly pop up on various Pentagon screens.

He was kept in a police station overnight. The British arresting officers told him not to worry. A bit of cheeky hacking would most probably get him a few months' community service tops. But they didn't realise quite how draconian the US administration had become post-9/11. US prosecutors saw him not as a north London nerd who had allowed his addictive actions to escalate stupidly, but as the man who had committed "the biggest military computer hack of all time". He had – the US attorney general's office told a press conference – "intentionally hacked into 97 protected computer systems. He stole computer files and obtained secrets that might have been useful to an enemy. He has done enormous damage to the computer systems of the United States government, and in so doing he has threatened the safety of every single American citizen. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, McKinnon intentionally caused a network in the Washington DC area to shut down, resulting in the total loss of internet access and email service to approximately 2,000 users for three days at a cost of $900,000 (£544,000). We will be seeking Mr McKinnon's extradition to stand trial in the United States of America."

The harmless nerd angle doesn't wash with them. Osama bin Laden, after all, studied civil engineering. You can be a nerd and still be dangerous.

McKinnon admits the hacking, but strenuously denies that his stated version of events tends to tally with the US version in every significant detail except one. US prosecutors say he deliberately destroyed files, making US systems inoperable after 9/11. Perhaps once, he told me, he might possibly have inadvertently pressed the wrong button and deleted some files on a US government clean-up directory, preventing them from rebooting for a while, but that would have been the worst it got.

If the US version turns out to be true would that make McKinnon a totally different character to the one he presents to the world? I think it wouldn't. I think he's essentially an idiotic but harmless conspiracy theorist who spent far too long on the internet because he was too nerdy to make it on the outside. He is a social type US prosecutors don't recognise.

Still, for all the powerful prosecution language, behind the scenes the two parties were offering each other deals. The US told McKinnon's solicitor that if he went to America of his own free will and pleaded guilty they'd give him only 18 months to three years in prison. But it wouldn't be in writing. The jail term was an estimate, not a binding promise. And McKinnon wouldn't be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea if the sentence turned out to be slightly more. McKinnon rejected the offer. He refused even to go to the US embassy to discuss it because it was US soil and he feared it was all a ruse to nab him.

The Americans countered that if he didn't accept the deal he'd be prosecuted "to the max". There were people who – they told his solicitor – "wanted to see him fry".

In return, McKinnon offered a harebrained counter deal. "I made a sort of veiled threat to them," he told me. "I said, 'You know the places I've been so you know the stuff I've seen.' And I found out that my landline was being bugged, so every time I was on the phone talking to a friend about it I made sure I'd say, 'All I want is a quiet life but if they really want to drag me through it I'll drag them through the shit too'. "

"And what would you have dragged them through the shit about?" I asked.

"You know," said McKinnon. "The, uh, non-terrestrial officers." There was a silence. "It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really, is it?" he admitted.

He also suggested that maybe in return for dropping the charges he could join their team and teach them the brilliantly clever ways of the hacker but they demurred, explaining that any idiot could have done what he did.

By March 2003 the two sides had reached stalemate. McKinnon – much against his timid, insular nature – was convinced to begin a charm offensive in the media. The first journalist he called was me. Then he went on the Richard and Judy show on Channel 4.

"You're facing 70 years in an American prison," said Richard.

"It must be terrifying for you," added Judy.

"It is terrifying," said McKinnon. "Almost as terrifying as being on Richard and Judy! Hahahahaha!"

He delivered the joke so nervously it came over as heartbreakingly awkward.

But I thought the most heartbreaking thing happened when he started giving interviews to journalists from UFO magazines and podcasts. He said that the photograph of the spherical, smooth object he saw buried away at the Johnson Space Centre – the one he told me had looked like a UFO but was probably a satellite – was definitely a UFO.

"It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object," he repeatedly said. "There were no visible seams or riveting. The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created."

It was as if impressing the UFO buffs – those people he'd spurned as a teenager for being too flaky – was all he had left. If he couldn't do that, then the whole endeavour had just been a giant awful mistake, a waste of a life.

As it turns out, McKinnon's fate was sealed on the weekend of 30 March 2003. If the then home secretary David Blunkett's published diaries are reflective of his preoccupations, he spent much of that weekend flitting between excitement and disappointment about the experience of going on Concorde.

"The trip was fantastic," his diary read, "but there was really no top-class professional service for the money. They don't even bother giving you any kind of memento." On and on it went. He conceded that a flight attendant did present him with a bottle of champagne, and one of his security detail had managed to pocket a salt and pepper set, but still, "a memento would have been nice". When he arrived in the US he "flew straight on to Washington DC … where we had a number of meetings including one with John Ashcroft, the attorney general, where I signed a new extradition agreement."

That was all he had to say about the controversial 2003 Extradition Act. The treaty was designed to streamline the extradition of terrorist suspects by eliminating the requirement on the US to provide prima facie evidence when requesting the extradition of any UK citizen. So it gives the Americans carte blanche to take anyone they want from this country without having to offer evidence against them in a British court, although the UK still needs to provide evidence to the US in the reverse situation. Opponents of the act have pointed out that the British copy of it is written using American spelling – "extraditable offenses" appears with an S, not a C.

In 2008 McKinnon was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism that compels sufferers to indulge in obsessive behaviour such as compulsive internet use. Another symptom can be an overwhelming terror at the thought that one's life might be about to be turned upside down. McKinnon's solicitors believed the diagnosis might swing things in his favour, making extradition a cruel and unusual punishment. But yesterday those hopes ended.

The sad thing is that – after all he's been through these past seven years – his punishment hasn't even begun.

Article: Jon Ronson -  Guardian UK

Trial of an alien

Aug 6th 2009
From The Economist print edition

An eccentric computer hacker is the latest subject of “fast-track” extradition FOR a desperately wanted man, Gary McKinnon cuts an unassuming figure. According to American prosecutors, who appear to be on the verge of winning a seven-year legal battle to secure his extradition, Mr McKinnon carried out “the biggest hack of military computers ever” between 2001 and 2002 when, from his bedroom in London, he accessed 97 American military and NASA computers, allegedly causing $700,000 of damage. The 43-year-old, who was diagnosed last year with Asperger’s syndrome, a type of autism, says he was looking for evidence of UFOs.

Mr McKinnon’s impending removal has caused an outcry in Britain, which has always had a soft spot for eccentrics. But Britons are also upset at what they see as a lopsided extradition arrangement with America, whereby the bigger country can grab suspects from Britain more easily than vice versa. Post-Iraq, any hint of American bullying hits a nerve: Boris Johnson, the excitable mayor of London, spluttered that giving up Mr McKinnon would be “one of the most protoplasmic acts of self-abasement since Suez”.

Extraditions between Britain and America certainly are lopsided in number (see chart). Since 2001 America has plucked 97 people from Britain and yielded only 38, though it is five times as populous as Britain. Some blame this on a change to the extradition law in 2003: whereas Britain must demonstrate “probable cause” before a suspect may be extradited from the United States, America need prove only “reasonable suspicion” before Britain will hand a suspect over. The Home Office says that these concepts are about as close as the two countries’ legal systems will allow. But they are not identical: Lady Scotland, the attorney-general, has admitted that probable cause is “a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that”.

In truth the imbalance may in large part reflect the fact that there are more American fugitives in Britain than there are British gangsters in America. The Home Office could not substantiate its hints that most extraditions to America are of Americans, rather than of Britons such as Mr McKinnon. But it pointed out that in its legal dealings with Spain, a notorious hangout for British crooks, Britain receives four times as many extradited suspects as it sends. The imbalance may also suggest that British prosecutors are less tenacious than their American counterparts, something that has long been asserted in the field of corporate fraud and until recently was true of drug smuggling.

Nonetheless, many worry that Britain’s extradition arrangements have become too free and easy, thanks to the legal changes in 2003 that lightened the burden of proof in seeking extradition for 51 countries, including a few rather dodgy ones such as Azerbaijan. Last month Andrew Symeou, a 20-year-old Briton, was extradited to Greece to face manslaughter charges over an assault in a Greek nightclub in 2007. The evidence is sketchy; the High Court said in a ruling that the absence of any sort of investigation before such extraditions “may be a matter for legitimate debate and concern”.

Another change is that Britain may now extradite a suspect to a European Union country even if his alleged crime is not illegal in Britain. Last year Frederick Töben, an Australian citizen passing through Heathrow airport, was nearly extradited to Germany to stand trial for Holocaust denial, which is illegal in Germany but not in Britain. (The request fell through because the German warrant was faulty.) Others worry that Poland’s strict law on abortion could cause similar problems.

Mr McKinnon’s supporters say he ought to stand trial in Britain (if at all) because of his health, which would not stand up to an American trial and possible imprisonment. But the 2003 law does not allow the British courts such discretion. How times have changed: it was only ten years ago that the government decided to block the extradition of Augusto Pinochet, a former Chilean dictator, on the grounds of his supposed ill health. It is hard to escape the feeling that they let the wrong one go.