The Sunday Herald in Scotland has published an interview with Gary McKinnon by Vicky Allan:
"America's Most Wanted HackerThe US wants Gary McKinnon to be extradited for breaking into military systems. But the Scot claims he didn’t do any harm …
By Vicky AllanNOT that long ago, it seemed Gary McKinnon was doing all right. After months of unemployment he had just got a job as a maintenance manager. He had a girlfriend. He had given up smoking dope, stopped computer hacking, called a halt to all that furtive raking through US military computer systems that had consumed him from 2001 to 2002. Early last month, however, all that changed.
It was the evening of June 7. McKinnon was out celebrating his first day on the job, and had decided to head back home to pick up a DVD and a bottle of wine. He left the house, walked a short way, and turned back for something he had forgotten. That was when the car pulled up and he knew from a glance at the three police officers inside that the moment had come. This was it. The cloud that had been hanging over him since March 2002 was about to release its contents. "I wasn’t scared," he tells me. "Just really upset. This was what I’d been dreading for three-and-a-half years."
What he had been dreading was extradition to the US. McKinnon had first been arrested three years previously by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. The charge: that he had hacked his way into 53 US military computers. Back then, no action was taken against him; there was just talk that he might be extradited. The years, however, had passed and nothing had happened. He had almost thought that, if he just kept his head down, the US government would forget about him, little Gary McKinnon, the hobbyist hacker, self-taught computer systems engineer, UFO buff and one-time hairdresser who, according to some, performed the biggest military hack of all time. But Goliath, it seemed, was coming back for David. That June evening, he was taken to Belgravia police station, put in a cell, and, the following day, appeared in Bow Street magistrates’ court where he was given a date for an extradition hearing – July 27: this Wednesday.
We meet in a north London café a week before the hearing . Glasgow-born McKinnon leans back in his chair and draws on his cigarette. Normally, he says, he wouldn’t start smoking this early in the day. He is softly spoken, almost laid-back, dressed in a black T-shirt, his thick reddish hair in matted curls. He has a steady, sly-eyed gaze that makes him seem like he is smiling. At the time of his court appearance, newspapers described his appearance before the judge as casual; dressed in combat trousers, he blew kisses to friends in the gallery. Now, he points out that he’d been in a cell all night, and certainly hadn’t had a chance to go home and change. The US government accused him of stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, interfering with maritime navigation equipment and causing the US Military District of Washington to become inoperable; in total, claimed the Americans, $700,000 worth of damage had been done.
McKinnon denies some, but not all, of this and is keen to stress that he caused no damage. "They charged me with this because under American law there has to be over $5000 damage for it to be chargeable, and so they make it up. I think they define damage as having to rebuild the computers just in case I’ve left something on there. It’s not actually real damage, it’s the fact that they had to reinstall Windows and blank the hard drive. They also say I deleted 1300 files and brought down the entire military district of Washington, which I certainly didn’t do, and I hope no-one is capable of doing it."
It’s easy to feel sympathetic towards this amateur snoop, to believe that any one of us, had we the anarchic curiosity and determination, might have done the same. Now 39, McKinnon could be construed as a bumbling, naive fool: a Goldilocks who wandered on to the US military system, rifled through some files and discovered that Daddy Bear wasn’t happy to find him sleeping on his desktop. As he puts it: "I was in a place where I shouldn’t have been, but you get people who deface websites and create viruses and that’s pure vandalism. They call me the biggest military computer hacker, but I think the [famous 2000 computer virus] Love Bug hit military computers all over the place and caused millions of pounds worth of damage."
Since he lost his job following his arrest , McKinnon has had a lot of time on his hands. His bail conditions are unusual. Besides the usual stipulations – such as having to sign in at the local police station each day – it was ruled that he wasn’t allowed to operate any computer connected to the internet. I ask if this has been tough, but he doesn’t seem that bothered. "I just phone someone and say, 'Can you do this and that?' I get people to print up my e-mails." Mostly, he calls his mum.
These days, he gets up at 9am and spends the morning making phone calls to MPs who might be able to help. Currently, he is trying to persuade them to support Tory MP Boris Johnson’s Early Day Motion calling on the government to amend the Extradition Act 2003 to demand the US show prima facie evidence before extradition is granted (currently there is no need for this). McKinnon watches a lot of DVDs and reads books such as Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good and Mitch Alborn’s The Five People You Meet In Heaven. Between 6pm and 8pm he has to sign in at the police station. He is forgetful, a self-confessed 'airhead', so he has the alarm programmed in on his phone.
When I first tried to track McKinnon down, a friend of his told me he might not be able to even use a cellphone; after all, they are a kind of computer that can connect to the internet. Soon after, McKinnon called me. The phone, he says, is his lifeline. He wasn’t easy to pin down. For all his free time, he tried to cancel our meeting twice. The first time it was because he suddenly had to move house. His landlord didn’t like the publicity and was throwing him out. "I think basically he’s fairly old and he’s worried about all the attention. It was OK until it was all over the news."
He has reason to worry. Balanced on the precarious knife-edge of our extradition system, McKinnon has no guarantees of what might happen to him in the US justice system. If he was tried in Britain, he reckons, he might be jailed for five years; if in the US, he has heard talk of 70 years. He even worries that he might end up in Guantanamo Bay. Like many others who now face extradition to the US, he believes he should be tried in his own country.
Born in 1966, McKinnon lived in Glasgow till he was six . His only memory of his Scottish childhood seems to be sitting in class at primary school , staring into space. He doesn’t seem to have changed much . When we met at a tube station, a friend ran up to return a wallet McKinnon had left in his van. They joked about how he was always losing things, always leaving things behind. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother to London with the man who was to become his stepfather. Hailing from Falkirk, near UFO hotspot, Bonnybridge, his stepfather – who once dreamed he’d seen spaceships – sparked McKinnon’s fascination with UFOs, which he would later pursue as he trawled through US military computer systems for evidence of alien craft.
Gary McKinnon was always a bit different. At 14, he got his first computer, and while his friends were out drinking and smoking, he’d be sitting in his room trying to programme basic games, like those old-fashioned dot-and-line tennis matches. He was never a computer genius in that hyper-cerebral whizz-kid way. At 17, he worked for a while as a hairdresser, before deciding to do a degree in computing , which he flunked because he was "hopeless at maths". He did his first hack, into a German university’s system, in 1995. He remembers the buzz. "It became an addiction ," he says, sliding another cigarette out of the packet, "“a really unhealthy addiction. I think I have an addictive personality. I remember it was quite hard stopping smoking dope every day. I’m so glad that’s out of my system now because it dulls your head."
He was living with a girlfriend, Tamsin, in a sectioned-off part of her aunt’s house in north London when he first started hacking into US military systems. He would sit in their kitchen, racking up phone-bills and staying up late into the night. To begin with, he was working as a systems support engineer, but in October 2001 he left that job. He and Tamsin split but continued living in the same house. It was after he found out that the US military were using the Windows operating system that he decided it was worth a look. "I wasn’t even that good a hacker," he says. "I was a very lazy hacker. When a machine wouldn’t respond to my particular method, I just left it alone. I kept doing the same thing." His method involved cobbling together different people’s programmes and "large-scale fishing for blank passwords on private networks".
Often he’d have to wait hours before finding "something interesting" , such as evidence of anti-gravity technology, a mysterious system which some believe might power UFOs and could, like cold fusion, be a source of "free energy". He argues it should be "put to public use". It would, he says, "end the oil wars". According to McKinnon, part of the reason the US government is pursuing his case – despite its potential to reveal embarrassing laxity of security – is because of the secrets he has witnessed. "They know what I’ve seen, which is more than is in the papers."
He started leaving messages on desktops – diatribes about the system, all signed with the moniker, "Solo". Why Solo? “Because I worked on my own. You get a bit megalomaniacal when you’re in these places. I used to leave the notes. That was my form of disruption or 'hacktivism', as someone called it.”
Hearing rustlings in the bushes outside the house, McKinnon began to think he was being followed. He had read stories about people who had researched anti-gravity technology and then disappeared. In the end, he was caught because he gave himself away. When he ordered Remotely Anywhere, the program he used to hack, he gave his girlfriend’s e-mail address. Perhaps subconsciously, I suggest, he had wanted to be caught. "There was an element of that," he admits. "I was definitely relieved when it was over. It screwed my relationship, my job, even me. I wasn’t really looking after myself ."
He recalls the first time the police came for him in 2002. It was 8.30am and he had just fallen asleep. He wasn’t properly awake and thought he was dreaming when the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit Officer arrived. At the police station, he confessed almost immediately. "I told them everything – not the damage, because I’ve never admitted to that. But it was all on my hard drive anyway, so I just admitted to everything that was on the hard drive. When I eventually did get a solicitor she was like, 'Oh God, why did you do that?' But actually, in the fullness of time that has proved to be good because I have been completely open."
McKinnon is aware of his "little guy against the system" appeal; aware, too, that all too often people consider his predicament a joke: the UFO buff who managed to slip behind the mighty defences of the US government. The prospect of 70 years in prison is, however, no joke for him. He is genuinely scared, yet also defiant. "I am unashamed," he says. "These guys are supposedly the toughest superpower on the planet, yet they had blank passwords. It was just ridiculous. It was like if you saw an aircraft hanger containing loads of weird aircraft in it and the door was open and there were no guards, and you could just walk in there."
Put that way, who could resist?
www.freegary. org.uk
24 July 2005