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Nov. 20, 2007 - Project Camelot
48:51
Project Camelot interviews Gary McKinnon
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Time Text
Music I'm here with Gary McKinnon
And we're here to talk about His possible extradition To the United States For some hacking that he's done And some investigation He's also done On the part of UFOs And disclosure Um
So, Gary, maybe you can tell me what it is that the US government is really sort of on about in regard to you and your perspective on it.
The main thing that concerns me, I've made full and frack admissions all the way down, two police interviews, that yes I did attain unauthorized access to these systems.
But they're piling on these ridiculous damage claims and I've since found out that for it to be worth a year in prison in America for an extradition case, It has to be worth at least $5,000 of damage because it comes under cybercrime.
So as if by magic, lo and behold, every machine I was on, I'm accused of causing exactly $5,000 worth of damage to.
So it's patently untrue.
And in my opinion, and the opinion of others more well informed than me, the pressure they're bringing to bear has more to do with where I've been and what I may have seen.
Okay, so yeah, I found that very interesting that they were actually claiming damage because my understanding is you were on a dial-up modem and that you didn't even download files.
So how is it that you actually did any damage?
They've got no explanation.
I mean, they just claim it.
And under this new extradition law, you don't have to provide any evidence, which is ridiculous.
And also, it hasn't been signed on your side of the water.
Congress, Senate, hasn't ratified it.
So at the moment, it's a treaty with only one signature.
Okay.
And you had one hearing.
And when was that exactly?
The last one was I think in the middle of May or towards the end of May, I'm not sure.
And you have another one coming up in July, is that right?
No hearing scheduled as yet.
We've got until June the 21st to make representations to the Home Secretary.
And then after which time he'll make his decision as to whether or not the extradition is allowable.
And then if he decides that it is allowable, which I'm sure he will, then I can go in the appeals process.
Okay, and so once you're in the appeals process, you basically, you're still safe over here, so to speak, in terms of, you know, they actually can't do anything to you yet.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Yeah, I mean, I've been on bail now, £5,000 security for months and months, and since before that, well, for four years, since the arrest.
For four years?
Yeah, March 2002, they arrested me.
Wow.
Okay, so...
Maybe you could explain exactly what you're in for, or, you know, up for, I guess might be a better word.
Apparently it's seven counts of intentional malicious damage and unauthorized access, each count carrying ten years maximum each.
And previously, the American government had tried to do some deals with me, whereby they said, if you don't force us to go through extradition and just come across of your own free will, then we'll give you only three to four years in prison, most of which you can serve in your own country after the first six months or twelve months.
I said, fine, that sounds great, give me that in writing.
Guess what happened?
I didn't get it in writing.
So I said no to the various deal offers.
So it looks like, on paper, they said to me, if you don't accept the deal, we'll prosecute you to the max.
That's a verbatim quote from Ed Gibson, who was the attaché of the US Embassy in London at the time.
And to me, that's not a deal.
A deal is something arrived at after reasonable discussion between two or more parties.
Absolutely.
Not saying, here it is, if you don't take it, we'll prosecute it to the max.
So yeah, I think they do want to try and push for the full 60, 70 years in prison, which is ridiculous considering they had blank passwords, in other words, no passwords.
Right, so let's get into that a little bit.
You basically, I don't know if you want me to use the word hack.
I don't know if you consider yourself a hacker or did at the time.
I never did consider myself a hacker at the time.
And also basically all I was doing, because it was an administrator level account, let's not forget, with full control of the local machine with a blank password.
So it was almost like logging on.
So let's back up one minute here and exactly what were you looking for when you were doing this?
At first I was looking for anything to do with UFOs.
As I got more into the subject and Listened to more serious talk and discussion about the subject and was introduced to the Disclosure Project and realised that there were, you know, 400 witness testimonials from people that had worked from everything in civilian air traffic control up to military radar operators, right up to men and women in charge of whether or not to launch nuclear missiles.
I thought these are surely credible people.
And the whole suppressed technology thing of it, which kind of grabbed my humanitarian side.
I thought, crikey, we're having...
Wars over oil, you know, we're burning fossil fuels, polluting the environment.
We have old age pensioners dying in Britain because they can't afford to heat themselves because the fuel bills are so high.
So I thought, why on earth is this technology being sat on?
I can see perhaps some of the arguments that may be forwarded, you know, what if terrorists had free energy or terrorists had anti-gravity or, you know, what if terrorists had guns?
Everything's dual use.
Sure.
Yeah, if you protect it, make it tamper-proof, anything, but just get it out to the public because surely everyone should have it.
Okay, but as far as the hacker community, you said I believe in some of the things I read that you came across a lot of other sort of interested parties that were investigating the same place as you were and were aware that they were blank passwords and were able to get into via the administrative sites.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, I would have been surprised if there wasn't anyone else.
Because it wasn't even really a hack to get into.
It was just large-scale phishing for blank passwords.
And some of these places, you know, were pretty special places.
There weren't places that you think wouldn't have firewalls or blank passwords.
And this was what year that you were involved in this?
2000, 2001.
It's not that long ago, so computer systems should have been, especially for government and military and NASA, you would think they would be covered for things like that.
Absolutely.
In fact, I think there are supposed to be federal guidelines.
So in a way, you did them a favor.
Isn't that true?
Yeah, you could look at it like that, because I'm sure, I mean, the other connections that were there, Turkey, Holland, Germany, All across the world, you see the IP address that is connected to the machine, then you can look it up and find out which country is going to, and even which businesses own the IPs.
And I don't know whether that was foreign governments, it could have been Al-Qaeda, it could have been someone else just like me, just snooping around, who knows?
That's a very interesting point.
So you've got these administrators, basically, that got found out because of what you did.
I mean, is that what we can assume?
No, it's good to clarify that it's the administrator account.
A lot of the time on a corporate network or a large organization like the Army or the NASA isn't actually used.
There isn't an administrator.
But it's a built-in account, so you can't delete it.
You can rename it.
But that's for, say, if someone wanted to do something system-wide across the whole network, they would use that account to log in remotely because that gives you full control over the machine.
But it doesn't actually refer to a particular person Oh, so no particular worker involved in that maintains the site or anything?
That's correct, yeah.
Although obviously they must have IT staff that look after things.
Right, and didn't you encounter one such person, or was he an IT guy on the other end?
Yeah, yeah, he was a network engineer.
Because I had graphical remote control of the machines, it was literally like sitting on the chair opposite the screen, opposite the monitor.
I think I must have got the time zone wrong when he was working late hours or whatever, but you obviously saw the mouse moving across the screen.
And next thing I know, WordPad flashes up, and someone types, who are you?
And I panicked, didn't want to get caught.
I thought very quickly on my feet and turned around my own investigations into an explanation to answer him.
And I said, I'm from Nipponet Security, which is the non-classified internet protocol and router network.
And I've discovered someone authorized scanning coming from this machine and I'm here to investigate it.
And he immediately, it was a good ploy of mine, human nature, you know, tried to impress me with his knowledge and showed me this, did a virus scan and pretty much showed me that the machine was clean.
Wow.
And then moved along.
And he was never the wiser?
Because I know that this was linked somehow.
Well, right.
But I mean, you know, my understanding was it was linked somehow to you actually getting caught, what, a month later?
Or I don't know how much longer.
I can't actually remember when that incident took place.
I was doing this every night, all night, practically for two years.
Not really looking after myself very much.
So dates and things are a bit mangled.
So this was a real passion of yours, in other words?
Oh, yeah.
And would you say, I mean, was the passion for information related to UFO and hidden technology, was that kind of your passion?
Or would you say, what would you say is your passion in that regard?
I passionately believe that we should all have this technology.
And not so much, obviously, you know, if you could confirm the existence of extraterrestrials and their contact with us, then that would be good.
But to me it was more important to have this free energy system.
Okay.
So what did you find out?
About free energy and anti-gravity, unfortunately nothing at all.
But the UFO thing, as far as I'm concerned, it may sound circumstantial to some, but as far as I'm concerned, it's proven.
As part of the disclosure project, there was Donna Hare and Laza, a photographic scientist, who had up to secret clearance, was in Building 8 of Johnson Space Center, she says in her testimony, and that one of her colleagues was doing some photographic work, invited her over to look at it.
And she saw high-res satellite imagery, maybe half a K above the treetops.
I think it was like a white disc.
And she had first thought, oh, it's a blob in the emulsion, you know, some kind of fault with the photographic process.
And he said, well, look, you know, blobs in the emulsion don't have perfectly formed shadows going in the same direction as the trees, etc, etc.
All the detail was there.
And she basically was saying that they had this whole place in Building A for airbrushing out UFOs on a regular basis, because they then, you know, sell on their imagery to universities and the like.
And having been all over other NASA installations already, I assumed the blank password scanning method would work the Saban-Johnson Space Centre, and it did.
Once I was in there, I used various network commands to strip out the machines that were in Building 8 and got onto those.
And the very first one I was on literally had what she said.
I can't remember if it was filtered and raw, processed and unprocessed, but there was definitely folders whereby there was a transformation in the data taking place between one and the other.
These folders were full of images in a proprietary NASA format, or in a format I'd never seen before, no JPEGs or GIFs.
They're also 200-300MB in size, and being on a 56K dial-up modem, there was no way I was going to download it.
It's like 5 minutes per megabyte.
So what it did, the remote control program that gives you graphical control of the machine, turned the resolution right down, turned it down to, I think, four big color.
And then on the desktop of the NAS machine, navigated to the folder, double-clicked on the first image, the application launches, the image comes up on the screen, but it's still very, very slow.
And what I saw, I was hoping to see exactly what she was describing, you know, sources and very definite imagery.
and what instead I saw was, I assume was the earth, this was in shades of grey, but you had the earth's hemisphere, I think about two thirds of the screen, and then halfway between the top of the hemisphere and the bottom of the picture, it was a classic sort of cigar shaped object, but if you don't, it's a golf ball dome, it was a classic sort of cigar shaped object, but if you don't, it's a golf ball dome, geodetic dome, above, below, and this side, and I assume the other side as well, so it's the left and right
cigar ends, no seams, no rivets, no sort of telemetry or antennae or anything like that, and it looked, I just had a feeling of not being man-made, it was none of the sort of size.
So, in essence, it was a craft, is what you're saying?
Yeah, yeah.
When I first saw the top half of it, I thought, oh, bollocks, you know, a boring satellite picture or something.
But as more of a thing was revealed, it was obvious it wasn't like any satellite I'd ever seen.
Wow.
And I've been space mad since I was about 14, so I've seen lots of pictures of satellites.
Okay, so you knew what you were looking at to some degree.
So, basically, did you feel, I guess during those two years that you were doing this investigation, threatened by what you were doing?
Were you, in other words, I mean, technically you got caught out by one guy, right?
Was that the only time?
No, I mean, that guy, that network engineer sort of saw me, but didn't realise that I shouldn't have been there.
The chat that actually caught me was in Naza, when this photograph was about three quarters of the way down on the screen.
And you see the mouse move, he right-clicked the local area network collection icon, chooses disconnect, bash, that's me.
And that's why it was such a strange moment, it was triumphant in a way, I thought, I've completely corroborated what Donna Hare has said, you know, on my own.
But then got caught at the very same moment.
Well, when you say you got caught, I mean, how did he catch you?
I understand he closed down the network so you couldn't continue to visit.
But does that mean he actually knew who you were at that point?
Or did it take them a lot more investigation to find out actually where you came from?
It took them a while longer.
I think a good while longer.
Although I'm not sure how much longer.
Because again, I can't remember if that was...
I was fairly near the end of my investigations.
I think that may have been late 2001.
I was arrested in March 2002.
But what happened, I'm told, is that NASA and the various military establishments that I was in shared information, which I think these bodies should do more often than enough, just like law enforcement.
And I realized that whoever had been in the system was using the same tools, the same program, the same method of entry.
And I think Naza knew it was from a United Kingdom IP address.
This is the thing, I wasn't a professional hacker, so I wasn't always covering my tracks and stuff or thinking properly.
I was, you know, being in time zones when people were still working in the offices and such.
So, yeah, that's...
So, have you...
Okay, Donna Ware, I guess you heard her testimony or saw her testimony somewhere.
Was it on the web or how'd you come across...
Yeah, the disclosure project website there, 2001 National Press Conference.
Oh, I see.
And has she ever gotten in contact with you at all?
No.
But you must know that there was...
Okay.
And you've actually been interviewed by a number of publications and reputable establishments, so-called, such as the BBC, is this right?
Yeah, BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV. And The Guardian?
The World Service, The Guardian.
Financial Times?
Yeah, the FT, I've been in the Metro, the Standard, the Daily Mail, Want Me at the moment, but I'm yet to return his call.
Okay, and just recently I guess by Linda Moulton Howell.
Yeah.
Okay, for Coast to Coast or possibly for Coast to Coast at some point.
Yeah, Earth, Stars and Dreamland.
Ah, for her own website.
Okay.
Yeah, just wondering because I know that your cause is kind of a cause celebre here in the UK, but it's not really getting the kind of coverage that it deserves in the United States at this point.
Isn't that right?
Yeah, in my view, there's a deliberate news blackout over there.
I've only had contact from, I think it was CNN and none of the other news networks.
Because I think there seem to be two factions in the US military and government.
One of them is hugely embarrassed by what you could term failings in security.
No firewalls, no passports, no security, basically.
Especially since 9-11, you know, security should be a lot more strong.
And the other faction seems to want it all out in the open and to have a big show trial, a big circus trial, and say, this is what happens to hackers.
Oh, I see.
To use you as a scapegoat kind of a person.
Well, that sounds unfair and it sounds like, you know, just from the most obvious level is that why didn't they just hire you since, you know, you basically pointed out a real hole in the system.
They could have brought you on board.
It sounds like you're not totally against security, computer security.
Not at all, not at all.
You know, and I've got great respect for law enforcement agencies and military agencies, you know, when they're thinking correctly.
But I think these days they know I'm in complete disagreement with years and years of not American foreign policy.
I hate when people say, you know, it's American this, American that, because it's not the American people.
It's just you've been the victims of a succession of very bad governments with, you know, very short-termism outlook.
So I think they know that I wouldn't work for them.
How is the British government actually treating you?
Have you had any interactions with members of the British government?
Obviously, the right to MPs and that sort of thing.
But I am very disappointed when you think the first thing the British government did with this was hand it over at a plate to the American government.
All the evidence was in London.
My hard drive was in London.
I was in London.
I'd made a full and frank admission to all the unauthorised accesses.
All the details were there.
At first, the police here were quite friendly.
They said, oh, you may get six months of community service, you know, just helping the community at large, etc.
But when they went over to America and We had meetings with the Office of Naval Intelligence and I think possibly the Air Force Office of Special Investigations as well.
They came back with a completely different attitude.
Very, very heavy, very, very serious.
And then we suddenly got all the headlines about criminal masterminds and all this rubbish.
Right.
And isn't it true that you also sort of were inspired by war games to some degree, the movie?
That's kind of a misquote by John Ronson.
I said I had seen that, but I wasn't really inspired.
What actually inspired me was The Hacker's Handbook by Hugo Cornwall, who is now Peter Sommer at the London School of Economics.
Oh, really?
It was the first hard information publication I'd read.
In fact, the first issue was banned by the UK government.
It has to have a reprint and stuff taken out.
But now he's basically teaching, isn't that right?
Yeah, I'm not sure what he lectures in, no.
Oh, okay.
Alright, well that's very interesting that you sort of got into this via someone who's, I guess you certainly could say, working for the establishment on some level.
Right?
But he wrote a book about hacking.
I mean, hacking is a way of finding out information.
It's kind of slang for somebody who's an investigator, but maybe not liked or not appreciated by the powers that be, right?
Okay, yeah, like a journalist hacking away.
Right.
So, can you tell me what else you found?
Because I know that you have something, have some information in regard to non-terrestrial officers, is that right?
Yeah, there was an Excel spreadsheet and the title was Non-Terrestrial Officers and it had names, ranks, it wasn't a long list, it didn't even fill the whole screen I think.
Well, could you just generally say how many?
I mean, if you were to guess, are we talking 20, 50?
Maybe 30.
Did you notice if they were male or female by chance?
I can't remember.
Okay.
First names and last names?
Definitely ranks, but no, nothing to say, you know, army captain or navy captain or...
Ah, so the designation wasn't there as far as which organization they worked for.
So, I mean, that was entitled Non-Terrestrial Officers, and obviously it's not Little Green Men, so I was thinking, you know, what force is this?
And that phrase is nowhere to be found on the web or in the official army documentation or anything.
And the other thing was a list of ship-to-ship and fleet-to-fleet transfers.
Bear in mind, fleet-to-fleet, so multiple ships of materials.
And these ships weren't, you know, US Navy ships.
Again, I don't remember any of the names, but I remember at the time looking and trying to match up the names.
And there wasn't anything that matched.
So, now this theoretically would have been pretty top-secret information if indeed non-terrestrial is what it sounds to be, which is off-world, right?
Yeah.
I mean, I gleaned from that information by some ways that An off-planet sort of space marines is being formed.
And if you actually look at DARPA, Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency literature at the moment, in the last few years, and a lot of the government, the space command stuff, it's all about space dominance, you know, and it really is, you know, the final frontier.
So I think, yeah, it's natural for them to want to control space and be developing a space going full as a secret.
But I think most likely using technology reverse engineered from E-Team.
To get out there, in other words.
Yeah, and also to be cloaked.
I mean, otherwise, how many other governments would see this going on?
So, and this was, what part, I mean, was this NASA? Where was this?
Are you at liberty to say?
Again, I wish I was.
I find it so hard to remember all of it.
It's strange.
I can remember IP addresses, but lots of the names and where I was when I found particular things.
I remember thinking at the time, oh, this must be NASA and the Navy and all, you know, secret parts thereof.
So it was either the Navy or NASA I was in, most likely.
I think it was most likely the Navy, but I'm not entirely sure.
Okay.
So, at this point, this kind of a discovery is really stupendous, right?
I mean, for any researcher to come across something like that is pretty intense.
If what I surmised to be correct was correct, yeah, and it does kind of point that way, I think.
Okay, are you familiar with the Serpo story?
We've mentioned it, I've mentioned it to you, but I don't know if you've actually, because you're not on the web, right?
You haven't been on the web for a number of years.
That's correct, yeah.
That's part of your, what do you call it, probation?
Bail conditions, yeah.
Uh-huh.
So perhaps you didn't know about it, but it's an alien human exchange program that supposedly took place between, I think it's 1968, 1978, and there's been a release of information on the web.
And I've given you an article here from the Fourteen Times to kind of fill you in with it.
But just offhand in hearing about this, there were 12 astronauts that actually went to another planet.
The planet was called Serpo in the Zeta Reticlian System, supposedly.
Now, a lot of people say this is all disinfo, but the interesting thing is that when you say non-terrestrial officers, there's actually a chance that it could be the SERPO astronauts that this is referring to.
Does that link up for you at all?
Well, I mean, yeah, it certainly could do.
I think all things are possible in these kind of cases.
I mean, yeah, just the fact that it's not based on Earth doesn't necessarily mean it's orbiting Earth, does it?
It could just be based on another planet, another solar system.
Right, because it's just non-terrestrial, meaning not on the Earth.
So, yeah, we're talking about people that are based somewhere else in the solar system, theoretically.
Whether they're circulating, you know, circling...
The planet in a spaceship or they're actually on another planet.
Anyway, it's just an interesting link-up that's kind of unexpected, I would say.
So, what exactly happened to you when, like, sort of the blow-by-blow of when you got discovered?
I'd been asleep for an hour and it was about 8 o'clock in the morning and my girlfriend answered the door.
It was the National Hightech Crime Unit.
Four or five officers, a big police firm.
They came into the house.
They had a warrant for the address.
So unfortunately, my girlfriend at the time, her and I were living in her auntie's house.
We had the ground floor.
Her auntie had the top two floors.
But the warrant was for the entire house.
So unfortunately, as well as taking my PC, my girlfriend's PC, four other PCs I had there to fix for friends.
They also went upstairs and took my girlfriend's auntie's PC. They separated us both, and they were doing the Mr.
Nice and Mr.
Nasty routine.
Like, oh, I know what you're like, mate.
I used to dabble a bit, if you know what I mean.
And then, oh, we got into Nazareth and the Pentagon, did you?
Trying to get me to admit things before I was even in the police station.
So I kept my mouth shut, obviously.
And then we went down to the police station.
I was there for four hours.
It was time I used to couch up and some sleep.
I was absolutely knackered.
Then they brought me out of the cell after interviewing my girlfriend at the time.
Interviewed me for a few hours.
Threatened to go back and arrest my girlfriend's 15-year-old cousin just because she's at the house that the warrant was for.
And basically put me under great duress to actually say something without a lawyer being present.
Wow.
And I thought, well bugger it, it's all on my hard drive anyway, so I might as well just tell them now, because they'll find out anyway.
And that's been my...
It's a style ever since, you know, just full and frank admissions to the unauthorised access and the material I did download, but not the ridiculous claims of damage.
But then after that, I had two police interviews, the second of which the police had just been to, I think, Washington for the ONI, Office of Neighbouring Investigation, possibly AFOSI as well.
And they had a very different tone then, were very, very serious, and asking me more and more questions and actually trying to get me to be in places that I hadn't been in, which I found interesting.
And then November of 2000, having been arrested in March, in November of 2000 the Department of Justice said they intended to apply for my extradition.
They didn't actually apply for it then, but said they intended to.
And then we waited, and we waited, and we waited.
Nothing happened.
And then along came the 2003 special US-UK Extradition Act only, which required no evidence whatsoever on the part of the Department of Justice to be provided in order to take a UK citizen.
Now, we can't do that to a US citizen.
You're provided by, protected by your constitution.
And this treaty is only being signed by the British, not signed by the Americans.
Right, so...
400 people are currently under threat of being extradited with this.
Are they?
Yeah, and America has extradition agreements with 119 countries, and only Britain and Ireland agree to extradite their own nationals without evidence.
It's a ridiculous situation.
And there's also the, I guess there's the Guantanamo Bay sort of specter out there.
Yeah, someone said to me, they said the fact that most people in Guantanamo Bay haven't even had trials yet, so they're not proven to be terrorists, although I'm sure many of them may be.
Whereas I've allegedly directly attacked American military sites.
Sounds like a good one-way ticket to me.
And also the fact of this Military Order No.
1 where you have a secret military tribunal, no right of appeal, no right of comment.
They declare national security and the whole thing is in a black hole from then on.
So, you have a lawyer, is that right?
Absolutely, yeah.
And I get legal aid here.
Because I'm unemployed, you get free legal advice.
Okay.
I don't know whether you're at liberty to say how they're going to be supporting you in this.
We felt that District Judge Nicholas Evans, who ruled in my last hearing, didn't really properly address all of the main points that were brought up.
I'm not sure if he's really qualified or experienced enough to properly address them.
Perhaps that's why he didn't.
So we feel that we've got a better chance on the appeal of getting things changed.
Also, we're actually trying to get the law changed.
It's not just about me, it's about many other people.
And the fact that you can be extradited without evidence.
So we're trying to get judicial reviews in motion and put some pressure on and got petitions going, etc, etc.
Okay, and you have a website, isn't that right?
That's right, yeah, freegary.org.uk.
Okay, very good.
So maybe you can tell me what it is that you sort of thought when you saw the non-terrestrial officer list?
I thought, wow, you know, I'm really onto something here.
But that, along with the material transfer thing, was the only two things I found.
And bear in mind, this is, I mean, 99% of the time you find nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
I was trawling these systems for years.
There were times I did know who I was, but I knew I was in the Pentagon, obviously.
But a lot of the time, when you're first getting your entry into the fringes of the systems to try and obtain deeper entry and then leave into control, you were kind of shooting blind at first.
And there's a chap over here, Peter Warren, an investigative journalist, Who tells me that he went over to America to interview the top brass and said to them, why are you pursuing this guy so vehemently?
Why is this the first extradition in a hacking case ever?
And someone apparently said to him, it's not because of what he's done or what he's saying, it's where he's been and what he may have seen that he's not saying.
Okay, well, let's pursue that for a second.
Is there some stuff that you haven't revealed to the press, for example, that you might have come across that, you know, is sort of your ace in the hole that you're holding, you know, some cards you're holding?
If there was, I wouldn't tell you.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Okay.
Fair enough.
And there's a sense that if you have information, that it would be stowed somewhere safe.
Because, look, people disappear every day.
Isn't that right?
So, hopefully you protected yourself on some level.
I'm not going to disappear.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, in a sense, are you actually considering yourself a bit of a warrior?
You're fighting a battle?
No, no.
I'm certainly in conflict, but Well, what I mean is like, in a sense, you're fighting a battle for disclosure when all said and done in the acts that you've taken part in.
Isn't that right?
I guess I am, but I get very impatient with this sort of cloak of grandness that a lot of people in this field tend to cloak themselves in.
And to me, it's a job that has to be done.
It has to be done, you know, pragmatically.
So I don't really see myself as anything.
I just want to beat this rap and then...
Carry on following the UFO disclosure thing, obviously through legitimate channels this time.
Okay.
So, just out of curiosity, have you thought of writing a book?
I hadn't thought of it and then John Wiley and Sons approached me and they got me to write the blurb, you know, the new book proposal document.
And write some stuff on the back, you know, Gary McKinnon tells us this, that and the other.
And they said, oh great, you know, it sounds really good, wow.
And then they had a meeting with their legal department from stateside, it's an American based company, company ultimately.
And that was it.
I've got some people in Hollywood that might be interested.
How do you feel about that?
As long as I can stay in this country and film it.
As far as your background, you're not really a skilled, educated IT guy, is that correct?
I am skilled, but I've got no formal qualifications.
Uh-huh.
But when you started this sort of search, had you worked in the field?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I had my first computer at 14.
I learned to program in BASIC, then I learned to program in Assembler.
And then didn't do any computing work for a long time, but it was a hobby.
Graphics programming, OpenGL, artificial intelligence, games programming.
And then went to study computing, but found I had a lack of ability at high-level maths.
So I couldn't even start with a computer science degree.
So they bumped me down to a higher national diploma, and I still had trouble with higher level maths, so I had to leave that altogether.
And just went to work in it.
Got my first job with no experience whatsoever, apart from my own hobbyist experience.
Just installing and configuring windows.
And from then on you get another contract, you get more experience, you do more stuff.
And at that time employers respected experience more than pieces of paper.
And I found later on they started to respect the pieces of paper more, but I could sit next to ten guys with NCSEs and whatever and be better than all of them put together just because of twenty-odd years' experience, by any means.
Great.
So you've done some game and artificial intelligence work as well?
Yeah, not for work, for pleasure.
Genetic algorithms, fuzzy logic, that kind of stuff.
Fabulous.
And I understand you're also into graphics.
You have a background in that as well.
I'm using OpenGL as a way to learn the C++ programming language because you get lots of visual feedback.
It's a very rewarding way to learn something that's quite dry, really.
Okay, cool.
So you're very self-taught in a lot of ways.
Now, I'm just curious, have you had maybe the hacker community come out for you in any way?
Because I was never part of the scene, so to speak.
I did contact a couple of chaps whom I saw in a news group posting what seemed like very well-informed and knowledgeable comments upon my case.
And one of those chaps is now the guy that runs the Free Gary website.
He's very knowledgeable, very worthwhile, very, very caring.
One of these people that just seems to be sacrificing his entire self for the good of everyone else.
And I've read some stuff that lots of hackers are angry.
I've read that hackers have said, oh, if Gary goes to jail in America, we'll hack the bejesus out of the American government.
Please don't do that, chaps.
Do you have other people that are sort of in there batting for you, like family, friends?
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, my mum's a tower of strength, you know.
But I'm lucky enough to have four parents.
I speak to my step-dad and my real dad a lot and my step-mom.
Not quite so often because she still lives in Scotland.
But yeah, friends are incredibly supportive.
Having told me to stop doing what I was doing, they didn't really know exactly what I was doing, but they knew I was in places I shouldn't have been.
And they're all saying, you know, that's very silly, you shouldn't do that, and trying to discourage me from doing it.
And then they were very angry when it first came out that I'd been caught.
But yeah, they're incredibly supportive.
Okay.
And I think the best thing is when we just make jokes about it, because it's quite dark sometimes, thinking, God, I could be facing 60 years in jail.
So it's good to keep a sense of humour.
Right.
You know, when you do investigation for two years, I'm sure that, you know, a lot of it sort of goes into the back of your head somewhere.
And I was just curious whether or not, you know, of course, I don't know what you're reading lately or anything, but if you ever...
Find things that collaborate, what you might have come across, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
I mean, my story in itself, just that hacking story, I didn't find out.
Well, there was only a few items.
There's nothing more that I've forgotten than that is all there is, the Excel spreadsheets and the picture.
But you're absolutely right.
Having read lots of stuff recently, I've had so many people get in contact with me, and thanks to all of them sending me books and DVDs and being unemployed and stuff, it's really nice to have something for your brain to chew over, you know?
Sure.
And I did realise there were places I'd been, which I didn't know at the time, but I've since found out, are apparently hotbeds of UFO activity at China Lake.
Well, certainly, I guess, Johnson Space Center.
Well, yeah, absolutely, Johnson Space Center.
A couple of NSAE machines in Fort Meade as well, actually.
So, yeah, the stuff...
I do think I probably was in places that were more sensitive than I realized at the time.
I probably missed a whole lot of stuff, you know.
So you did keyword searches, isn't that right?
Well, no.
It's no good just being an administrator of the machine.
You have to become what they call a Microsoft domain administrator, so you've got full control of the entire network.
Once you've got that, you can run out a program.
I used one called Land Search, I think, at the time.
It just searches every single computer and picks up files of certain types.
But unfortunately, at that time, it wasn't good enough to look for keywords within the files.
Ah.
So I had to get creative with file names.
Wow.
So you could have just missed something that was top secret just because it was called some innocuous name that didn't trigger any idea?
Yeah.
And also, I eventually realized there was one network I was on, I'm going to say which, where...
Because of the technique of rather than going around with a CD and installing windows on every machine individually, you create what's called an image.
And you shoot that image across the network onto each machine.
On this particular network, the image would be made with a blank administrator password.
So I had 5,000 machines all with blank administrator passwords.
What was the question there?
How do you search something like that?
Oh right, yeah, that's what I started to realize.
This was just too huge a job for one person.
Right, absolutely.
It could take years and years and years.
And it did become boring because most of the time you find nothing.
And also my relationship was going down the pan.
I just left my job.
I was going down the pan, wasn't eating properly, wasn't washing properly.
It was a proper unhealthy obsession.
So you were really motivated though, on a certain level?
Yeah, I thought I was doing something that would ultimately benefit a lot of people.
Well, I think there are a lot of people out there that would support sort of the right to know on a certain level, certainly free energy.
And if we, look, if we're sending officers off world, then what are we doing using things like the space shuttle, the ancient...
Machinery that's blowing up in space.
I think what you're saying about, you know, hacking to find stuff out, I think I wouldn't advise anyone to do it or anything like that.
But there's plenty of times in the history where you can only gain freedom by breaking the law.
Jesus himself, I remember in the Bible, telling people off where poor people were stealing food off the tables.
And they were, you know, cutting their hands off.
And he's like, yeah, they're poor.
They're starving.
Let them steal a little bit.
How's it going to hurt you?
Right.
Do you envision a future for yourself?
I'd like this whole thing to be dropped or at least to be tried in my own country.
That's the first thing.
That's obviously taking up a lot of my energy at the moment.
Beyond that, I'm absolutely fed up with fixing people's computers.
I'd like to follow my singing ambitions, which is whereby my passion lies singing and songwriting.
I'm sick of machinery and technology.
Fast living and profit.
Okay.
So, is there anything else that you'd want to, you know, tell people that kind of about this experience, about where you were at those two years?
Obviously, it's a few years later, you're kind of older and wiser, but, you know, Is there a message within what you were doing back then?
If you can place yourself back then.
Always listen to your girlfriend.
Okay, I hear that.
Very good.
Okay, well this is Carrie Cassidy and we've been talking here with Gary McKinnon and having a beer out in a pub, the back of a local pub.
Here in London, on the outskirts, isn't that right?
That's correct.
And I do have one other question.
I'm wondering, do you think to this day that you've got organizations that are using that kind of administrative blank password, duplicating desktops?
Right.
Well, I'm not sure, but I mean, is it the government accounting office over there, the general accounting office?
They put out a report every year, appraising federal security and like critical national infrastructure.
And I read that every year, and every year it doesn't get any better.
Wow.
So I think, you know, I'd stake a hefty amount of money that if I went and did that again today, that you could probably do the same thing again, yeah.
So what that actually means is that there could be easily some people out there that are coming across the same things you are.
I reckon, yeah.
They're just not getting caught.
Yeah.
Now, just in terms of the ET situation, did you ever have a sighting yourself or have you ever, you know, had any interactions with other races, other beings from other planets?
No, I saw something once when I was about Maybe 11 or 12, I think.
And it was just a light in the sky.
It was nighttime.
And it wasn't moving in a straight line.
It was moving very erratically.
It had a general direction, but it was moving very erratically side to side.
I thought, well, it's not a meteor.
You know, it's not a satellite.
But I didn't know what it was.
It wasn't an aeroplane.
You know, the sort of lateral motion was quite fast.
Okay.
My stepfather had seen some stuff and had dreams about UFOs.
He lived in Falkirk near Bolly Bridge, and Bolly Bridge is now quite a hotspot for UFO sightings.
And he was a sci-fi fan, got into sci-fi when he was young, so that kind of sowed the seed of this kind of stuff.
And also, God, just the thought of meeting beings, you know, from somewhere else.
It'd be better than swimming with dolphins, wouldn't it?
Good point.
So, did you do any investigation of your own governments?
Or are you at liberty to say?
Let me put it this way.
Our government security is very, very, very, very good.
Oh, really?
Computer security, yeah.
How about that?
That's very interesting.
And then again, so is the CIA. I mean, Langham, for instance.
Sorry, Langley.
That's very, very, very, very good as well.
But you were able to get into the Pentagon.
You were able to get into the NSA. Yeah, but that wasn't via breaking their security mechanisms as such.
That was via a very old technique called trust relationship exploitation.
You start off, say, on a Navy logistics site, which isn't well protected.
And because you're already coming from a dot mill internet address, then all the other dot mills trust you.
So you gradually go up the hill and get in deeper.
So were you reading emails during this time?
Were you able to come across that kind of thing?
No.
I made a personal rule not to read people's emails.
Oh, that's interesting.
I mean, I was looking for documentation, not communication.
Sure.
And once you'd started reading emails, I mean, crikey, what a load of data.
It's as if it would just be ridiculous.
Right.
What about the Majestic?
Are you familiar with the Majestic website with Majestic documents, top secret documents that some of which have been sort of exposed?
Yeah, I mean, I've heard about it.
See, at the time, I wasn't really in the sort of UFO scene as well as not really being in the hacker scene.
There's lots of stuff I wasn't aware of.
And if it hadn't been, I probably would have done a better job and got more out of it.
But as far as I know, the majestic things aren't proven to be real or false yet, are they?
And I don't like to accept anything that I don't know is, you know, absolute fact, which is why I went to find out for myself.
Right.
Rather than, you know...
Okay.
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Gary.
This has been great.
And we're going to try to call Jerry Pippen now, who's helped set this up for us.
And we hope to hear a lot more from you.
Love to know what you're carrying in your back pocket, so to speak.
I hope the day will come when disclosure allows you to actually reveal as much as you may have come across.
I didn't say I was carrying anything in my back pocket.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I understand, but you've got to understand that there's always the question and it's a fascinating subject.
Alright, well thank you very much.
I do have to appear, but I don't have the right to say anything.
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