Letting America have its way • 3 August 2008 • The SnowBlog
Letting America have its way
Poor Gary McKinnon. An unemployed IT worker from North London, he hacked into the Pentagon and looked for evidence that the government knows about aliens. (Which is interesting, because he always looks like a vulcan to me.) He actually thinks he found some - but while he was rooting around he left a few messages on people's desktops. One said 'Your security is really crap'. That seems to be the extent of his crimes. But he's to be extradited to the U.S. so that they prosecute him for imperilling their national security. And apparently he caused $700,000 of damage. Though I've seen plenty of instances of how calculations like that are performed and I've yet to see one that isn't nonsense. They're probably including the cost of patching their own faulty security in that estimate. Anyway, sentences of 70 years are being mentioned (plus sketchy references to the death penalty). Thanks to Gary the Pentagon's security is now more secure and no one got hurt - just as he intended. If only he'd been sensible and killed someone. He'd be looking at a fraction of the jail time.
Rob
Poor Gary McKinnon. An unemployed IT worker from North London, he hacked into the Pentagon and looked for evidence that the government knows about aliens. (Which is interesting, because he always looks like a vulcan to me.) He actually thinks he found some - but while he was rooting around he left a few messages on people's desktops. One said 'Your security is really crap'. That seems to be the extent of his crimes. But he's to be extradited to the U.S. so that they prosecute him for imperilling their national security. And apparently he caused $700,000 of damage. Though I've seen plenty of instances of how calculations like that are performed and I've yet to see one that isn't nonsense. They're probably including the cost of patching their own faulty security in that estimate. Anyway, sentences of 70 years are being mentioned (plus sketchy references to the death penalty). Thanks to Gary the Pentagon's security is now more secure and no one got hurt - just as he intended. If only he'd been sensible and killed someone. He'd be looking at a fraction of the jail time.