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NASA Hacker Gary McKinnon Interviewed
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat May 06, 2006 09:44 AM
from the out-of-this-world dept.
from the out-of-this-world dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A BBC article reports about an interview between Click and Gary McKinnon who in 2002 hacked into NASA and other US Military networks. In the interview he talks about how he accessed machines by using default passwords and a conversation with a NASA network engineer using Wordpad. He also talks about how he found information about anti-gravity, UFO technology, free energy and how UFOs are regularly airbrushed out from high-resolution satellite images."
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Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including The Boston Globe's Ombudsman speaks on Peter Quinn story, Microsoft continues to push their password-less approach to web browsing, Gary McKinnon extradition reopened, and more news on the organic car fuel front -- Read on for details.
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IT: Another NASA Hacker Indicted 164 comments
eldavojohn writes "Earlier this year, UK citizen & hacker of NASA Gary KcKinnon was extradited to the United States (also interviewed twice). Now, another hacker has been indicted for hacking more than 150 U.S. government computers. Victor Faur, 26, of Arad, Romania claims to have led a 'white hat team' to expose flaws in U.S. government computers. It seems everyone else has been busy hacking into government systems while I've been wasting my time playing Warcraft." From the article: "The breached computers were used to collect and process data from spacecraft. Because of the break-ins, systems had to be rebuilt and scientists and engineers had to manually communicate with spacecraft, resulting in $1.36 million in losses for NASA and nearly $100,000 in losses for the Energy Department and the Navy, prosecutors said. Several suspected NASA hackers have been dealing with law enforcement recently."
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IT: The Study of Physical Hacks at DefCon 299 comments
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I'm really skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of moron spends 3 years breaking into government computers and doesn't know how to do a screen capture or see the importance of saving what he's doing. Sorry folks, but from reading this interview, he seems like bullshit.
Re:I'm really skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
Can someone show me a a Java VM that existed and would have been the programming language of choice in the "dial-up days"? At least to me the heyday of dialup was the late 80s to mid 90s, then cable and DSL started taking over. The first version of Java wasn't released until about '96 and wasn't widely deployed/accepted until 2000 or so.
HOW did he see a "guy's hand move" over a dial-up connection that was sending about 1 frame every 2 minutes at best?
Idiot. I'm guessing the interview was so short because the BBC interviewer smelled the BS.
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Re:I'm really skeptical (Score:5, Informative)
He states that the image was downloading when a staff member physically accessed the computer and disconnected him. I know personally the program can freeze for a couple of seconds on a slow connection while taking screen shots. It is therefor quite plausable that he was waiting for the image to download before taking the screenshot and then did not have time - in the few seconds it takes for a person to go the bottom-right-corner of the screen and select disconnect - to take a screenshot of what had already downloaded (as he would have had no indication of someone being about to use the computer locally). 1 frame later and any cache of the image would have been lost.
This doesn't at all prove his claim of viewing a NASA UFO image are true but they are atleast plausable.
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UFOs, free energy, and anti-gravity? (Score:5, Funny)
UFO Vs Alien & Gary's Flakey Story (Score:5, Insightful)
I will preemptively state that UFO does not necessarily mean extraterrestrial technology or not from this planet. In the raw form of the acronym, it means simple that there is an Unidentified Flying Object. There are most likely hundreds of types of aircraft that governments around the world would refuse to classify due to a need to keep their enemies in the dark (national security).
From the article: He interchangeably uses "suppressed technology" with "UFO technology." I'm certain the United States Government has tons of suppressed technology as well as any other government for obvious reasons.
I should finish the quote, however: Ok, that last bit about free energy, you can go ahead and call him a nut job. And then there's also this: Yeah, Gary, it sure is crazy how you can mess with the color quality and resolution of an image to make it look like my family picture is really some image a green gelatinous blob that eats people. Uh, I only heard a story about a blimp above the earth's atmosphere. Where was the story where you saw a device that produced unlimited amounts of energy?
"In my house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" - Homer Simpson
Honestly... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had alien technology, had reverse engineered it, and knew how to make it work, we would be using it right now.
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UFO Conspiracy Theories Debunked by Geopolitics. (Score:5, Interesting)
You've obviously never read up on the kind of technological fantasies the US military has. Despite your BOLD STATEMENTS that EMPHATICALLY use CAPITALIZED WORDS which make me DOUBT YOUR SANITY, the US military is completely and totally incapable of understanding the words "good enough." Even though our military technology can stomp on anyone on the planet, the Pentagon has long argued for increased capabilities against a phantom Chinese threat. They conjure up the image of China suddenly having tech on par with ours in 10-20 years as a boogeyman to justify bigger and fatter budgets for more powerful weapons.
Second, the space program is a black eye for the US. It was a prominent sign of American strength and leadership that has decayed into a series of failures. It costs a ridiculous amount of money to send a space shuttle up and to deploy our many satellites. If we had alien technology, then we could half NASA's budget and accomplish the same goals. We could also cheaply weaponize space like the Pentagon always fantasizes about.
Third, oil. We have a lot of shady alliances worldwide that revolve completely around access to oil. Take Saudi Arabia. We've known for decades that the Saudis are state sponsors of terrorist groups and have spent their money heavily to foment Muslim radicalism. We know that the majority of the 9-11 attackers were Saudis. However, we're still all buddy-buddy with them because of oil. If we weren't dependent on oil, we could pressure the country towards democracy or at least leave it as some sort of backwater of no importance and focus on developing more friendly allies elsewhere.
Take Venezuela. The US government has long thought that the rise of Communism and Socialism in Latin America was to be stopped at all costs -- even to the point of toppling democracies for dictatorships. (I really, really hate this policy, BTW.) Venezuela is the vanguard of a new South American socialism movement, and it only succeeds because the state oil industry can support the entire economy. Guess what country is the number one customer of Venezuela despite our official dislike of Chavez? The US of course.
Take Iran. Right now, our conflict with Iran over nuclear power/weapons is sending oil prices skyrocketting and hurting Americans. If we had free energy, then Iran would have no leverage. If we were smart, we'd give it to the Chinese and the Russians and remove the economic leverage that makes them veto UN resolutions against Iran, Sudan, etc.
Oil blocks a very, very large amount of US foreign policy goals and make us have some goals that are very unsavory. Free energy would not only boost our economy, but it would make many of Washington's dreams possible. To say that we have it and aren't using it is to BLATANTLY IGNORE GEOPOLITICS.
Then again, I don't expect to reach you with facts. For crying out loud, you post a link to a site which goes on about "Illuminati," "The New World Order," and "Chemtrails." If you can offer a RATIONAL explanation of why we have a greater interest in hiding technology than in using it, I'd love to hear it. Bonus points if you can explain why 100 years advanced military technology isn't being used in Iraq right now.
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Re:UFO Conspiracy Theories Debunked by Geopolitics (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Honestly... (Score:5, Insightful)
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100 MPG carburetors, the Cold War, etc. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, yeah, and the oil industry is hiding the 100 MPG carburetor and a car that can run on water.
You know what? A little over 100 years ago, all the weatlhiest Americans and international investors had their money invested in railroads and related industries. The railroad was obsoleted for travel and for light shipping by the automobile and the airplane. The descendents of the people who were rich back then are still rich now.
I don't buy the argument that the oil companies could prevent such technology from being found out about or that their investors would be all that interested in stopping it instead of getting all their money into it first or at least into other lucrative industries. Why do you think Bill Gates diversified his portfolio years ago?
We've had many Presidents who were boosters of the space program or at least of our ICBM program during the Cold War. Had we a cheap way of getting to space based on alien technology, then why the hell would we waste all that money on chemical rockets when the life of the nation was on the line in nuclear detente? We could've dominated space over the Soviet Union with a fleet of craft, knocked nukes out of orbit on launch, and pretty much won the Cold War as a conventional war without all of the fuss.
Face it, Occam's Razor demands that the most simple explanation (that we don't have the technology) should be listened to over the theory that we have all the technology but the world hasn't been shaped by it because of a coalltion of people working for interests that don't match the public interests they should have.
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This guys best defense? (Score:5, Funny)
Who would believe him?
Ufos? not really... (Score:4, Insightful)
Airbrushed UFOs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Like this one? [dvorak.org]
(Yes, I know it's probably a water droplet on a high-altitude atmospheric camera, since there's a grid of them. Why wouldn't the "UFOs" airbrushed out by NASA also be weather balloons and similar artifacts?)
65000 passwords in 8 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
65000/8 = 8125 per min.
8125/60 = 135 per sec.
Dunno about that. Just the time it takes to bring up a socket and get some syn/ack going chews up a good portion of a second. Maybe he was searching a local password database.
Re:65000 passwords in 8 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the TFA he says he was on a 56K dial-up link...Say each machine sends a 25 byte login string, you send a 20byte login credentials, they send 50 byte denials. That is around 100 bytes pr machine, in a theoretical minimum (overhead for TCP/IP - telnet handshakes and such makes it probably three times as much). So 135 machines would mean 135*100bytes=13.5kB/sec. 56K modem has 33.6kb upload speed, so he could send 4kB/sec at optimal. So he is clearly a nutjob.
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Re:65000 passwords in 8 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple can't keep the date they launch new computers secret (next Tuesday for the next batch intel powerbooks, by all accounts). And that is a secret with a finite lifetime (three months ago not even Steve Jobs knew the date -- a week from now everyone will know it).
The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.
Remember this giant conspiracy is brought to you by the same people who run FEMA and promote "absitence only" sex education as a solution to teen pregnancy. But somehow the conspiracy works well until some script kiddie breaks into NASA over a dialup line (you plan to find free energy devices that will change the face of civilization, and you can't spring for DSL??) and you find that all these "secrets" are protected by default passwords. This guy presumably did hack into NASA, but the rest of it crap -- he is either nuts, or hoping that the Feds will decide it isn't worth the bother to have the guy spouting this nonsense on the stand.
Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Such a conspiracy would work by publishing the broad scope of what's going on, with a few errors added, as fiction. And also publishing a lot of other related, fictional ideas with the same premise. That way it's still effectively secret - you'll never know which one of the X-Files episodes was a true story - and anybody who tries to blow the whistle will be treated like a conspiracy nut and ignored, because everybody already thinks of that as fiction.
It's an insidious idea and it would probably work. Our abilities to falsify images, documents, videos, and even reality (to some extent) have grown so effective that it's no longer possible to prove that aliens exist: even if I brought a live talking mollusc over to your house, you'd get on slashdot and post about three different ways that could have been faked.
The simple fact is that people believe what TV tells them to believe, and TV tells them that people who believe in UFOs and aliens are crazy conspiracy nuts. We will probably never know whether or not this is actually true; the subject has become so obscured that truth is most likely unobtainable at this point.
So, yes, there could be a conspiracy going back 30 years with thousands of people in the know. No, I'm not saying that it wouldn't have leaked by now. I'm saying that if there was a conspiracy, the mere fact that we're talking about it indicates that it has already leaked, and the leaks have been ignored by the public because most of them didn't believe any of it. This should not seem unreasonable to you, because there are hundreds of subjects which involve information, of interest to the general public, which is only known by a group of a few thousand individuals simply because the rest are too stupid to understand it, or because TV told them it wasn't true. Subjects like medicine, biology, physics, statistics, and most other technically inclined disciplines are full of such things. It is a very small step to move from this to outright secrecy, when the populace at large would neither believe or understand the information that is being kept secret.
Whether or not that has actually happened? Well, I've just spent ten minutes explaining why you'll never get a useful answer to that. For practical purposes, it is unlikely that it will ever matter to your life in any way (regardless of what the answer is), and that's probably more important.
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Re:Conspiracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Works pretty well, I'd say. If somebody ever comes out and starts telling secrets, they are immediately branded a "giant conspiracy nutjob." And after that.... and after that nothing. Nobody pays attention to them any more. Case closed. I wonder how many of the people who screamed "nutjob" had even finished reading the article before they made up their mind. I wonder how many have done any serious research into the matter.
I'm not saying this guy is for real. You'd think he'd get something better than dialup if this is his obsession. But to claim that a massive conspiracy couldn't work is just ludicrous. It's all about getting people to play along, while compartmentalizing knowledge. It's possible nobody really knows all the big secrets out there. So then is it really even a conspiracy? Sounds more like it's just our fucked up world, where everyone thinks he knows everything.
The NSA can't randomly listen in on international calls for more than a year or two without someone blowing the whistle. The CIA grabs some very bad guy in Pakistan and holds his head underwater, and a few months later we can all read about it in the New Yorker.
The NSA has been listening to domestic calls for over 30 years. Get a clue. Read some of my older posts for more information on this. It's people like you who make "conspiracy" possible, because you don't question what leaders tell you. The reason why nobody is too shocked about Bush's international call spying is because most people of power in Washington know that the NSA has been monitoring domestic calls for decades. It's really not that big of a deal. But you can't talk about it in polite company without being branded a nutjob, no matter how many facts are on your side.
You're not one of those people who doesn't believe in any conspiracies, are you? There are folks out there who reject the very idea of a conspiracy, saying that it has never happened, in all of human history - EVER....And people say conspiracy "theorists" are the nutjobs. sheesh. The whole coincidence theory [wikipedia.org] crowd actually just makes the conspiracy theorist crowd more paranoid because it leads them to believe that everyone has been brainwashed. In a way, I suppose, it's true.
Conspiracies can be very benign and very mundane. For instance, I am party to a secret conspiracy to fool people worldwide. I bet you are, too. It involves telling children that a fat guy in a red suit flies around the planet delivering presents to the entire world in just 24 hours. That's right: Santa Claus. Have you ever really wondered why we tell our children such ridiculous lies? And the creepy thing is that every adult is in on the conspiracy. How can it be possible that we are all a party to this vast conspiracy? What do we even have to gain from it?
The weird thing is, if you dare to tell a child the truth, their parents will get upset at you! It's insane. I met a guy recently who admitted he believed in Santa until he was 16 years old. And somebody had to tell him! He was devastated! Now, if this guy tells me there's no such thing as UFOs, should I believe him? Personally, I was rigging boobytraps for Santa by the time I was 6 or 7 years old.
My point is, don't be so sure that our leaders are telling the truth. Sometimes people -- no, whole cultures lie, for no good reason. That doesn't mean Gary McKinnon isn't full of shit, but it's impossible to know for sure. There is certainly more to our world than meets the eye.
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I BELIEVE HIM (Score:5, Interesting)
* The "hand moving accross".. he meant the mouse was then controlled by someone viewing the desktop who realized he was remotely controlling.
* [possibly] that same person launched wordpad to type a message knowing he would see it, "who are you? what are you doing?"
* He didn't save anything because he was just discovering it and didn't know what he would be looking at in advance. Then he was cut off.
There is nothing unbelievable about his story unless you are still in denial that the governments are hiding free energy technology and awareness of alien life from the general public. If he has changed his story at all, it is probably because he is now contending with the fact that he may spend the rest of his life in 6'x6' concrete room in the US.
Free Energy is the death blow to the entire class/economic system that keeps most of the world enslaved to 12 families. If we all had access to Free Energy, no one would have to "Earn a Living", we would just live (imagine that). The perfect example is when J.P. Morgan pulled all his funding and effectively shut down Nikola Tesla when he realized Tesla was working on a free energy system. He said (parapharsing possibly) "if it's free to anyone, where do I put the meter?". In a matter of years Wardenclyffe was being dismantled and we know how the rest of the story goes.
Believe it.
Conspiracy theories are missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
Leaving conspiracy theories aside for a second, isn't it just as interesting and worth commenting on that several American military administrator users that are accessible over the internet aren't password protected, or that the same government is trying to throw this person in jail for sixty years for using these accounts, double what you'd get in the UK (the hacker's own country) for murder?
Honeypots (Score:5, Informative)
from http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink =2051653 [fark.com]
erewhon wrote:
Re:I'm not saying he's deluded but ... (Score:5, Funny)
I can - 5 years, 3 with good behaviour.
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Re:Can't get to story. (Score:5, Funny)
The Bildeberg Group. You will hear of them soon enough. The media has time and time again told you the official government conspiracy story which claims that a guy in a cave somewhere was behind 9/11. As you will find by clicking the link in my sig, the evidence clearly shows it was an inside job. Millions of people worldwide have realized this and if you Google you'll find more websites about this issue than you could possible read in your lifetime.
But now, reciently, Alex Jones and Sharlie Cheen were allowed to inform that 9/11 was an inside job on CNN (who originally came with the "government story" and are complicit).
You WILL be infomed about the Bilderberg Group soon. And perhaps the truth about UFO's. You see, "The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the CFR, the Trilateral Commission - founded by Brzezinski for David Rockefeller - and the Bilderberg Group have prepared for and are now moving to implement open world dictatorship within the next five years. They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens." (Dr. Johannes Koeppl, former official of the German Ministry for Defense and adviser to NATO, 2001)
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Re:Hand of God, Perhaps (Score:5, Informative)
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