|
Chapter 3
Game
over "Really," I say to him now, "WarGames should have put you off hacking for life."
"Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it to actually come true." WarGames ends with the Pentagon telling the young nerd how impressed they are by his technical acumen. He's probably going to grow up to have a brilliant career at Nasa or the department of defence. This is an unlikely scenario for Gary McKinnon. He currently faces 20 charges in the US, including stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, and interfering with maritime navigation equipment in New Jersey. Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street magistrates court - he had, the American prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of information ... The US military district of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $700,000 ... These [hacking attacks] occurred immediately after 9/11 ... " And so on. This is Gary's first interview. He called me out of the blue on the Monday before last, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking on people's doors and running away. "Your son sounds like a hacker," he told me. Then he invited me to his house in Bounds Green, north London. He is good-looking, funny, slightly camp, nerdy, chain-smokes Benson & Hedges, and is terrified. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control my own legs," he says. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking about jail and about being arse-fucked. An American jail. And remember, according to them I was making Washington inoperable 'immediately after September 11'. I'm having all these visions of ... " Gary puts on a redneck prisoner voice, "'What you doing attacking our country, boy? Pick up that soap.' Yeah, it is absolutely fucking terrifying. Especially because a friend of mine was on holiday in America once and was viciously attacked and ended up killing the guy who attacked him - he did 10 years in an American prison. He's quite a tough guy, and he said he had to fight tooth and nail every single day, no let up at all. And I'm thinking, 'I'm only a little nerd'." The prison sentence the US justice department is seeking - should Gary be successfully extradited - is up to 70 years. What Gary was hunting for, as he snooped around Nasa, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of a UFO cover-up. Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966. His father ran a scaffolding gang, but his parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," Gary says, "and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did." Gary read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age of science fiction" - and he joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, when he was 15. Bufora describes itself as "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma". "So you began to believe in UFOs," I say. "To hope," says Gary, "that there might be something more advanced than us, keeping a friendly eye on us. Hopefully a friendly eye." Then he saw WarGames, and he thought, "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try. He sat in his girlfriend Tamsin's aunt's house in Crouch End, and he began to hack. He downloaded a program that searched for computers that used the Windows operating system, scanned addresses and pinpointed administrator user names that had no passwords. Basically, what Gary was looking for - and found time and again - were network administrators within high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in. His Bufora friends "were living in cloud cuckoo land", he says. "All those conspiracy theorists seemed more concerned with believing it than proving it." He wanted evidence. He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be". "Like where?" I ask. "The US Space Command," he says. And so, for the next seven years, on and off, Gary sat in his girlfriend's aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mouse pad, and he snooped. From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason. On those occasions, Gary's connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary. He sounds to me like a virtuoso hacker, although I am someone who can barely download RealPlayer. I nod blankly as he says things like, "You get on to easy networks, like Support and Logistics, in order to exploit the trust relationship that military departments have between each other, and once you get on to an easy thing, you find out what networks they trust and then you hop and hop and hop, and eventually you think, 'That looks a bit more secretive.' " When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just an ordinary self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone. "Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand ..." "All on at once?" I ask. "You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?" "Every night," he says, "for the entire five to seven years I was doing this." "Do you think they're still there? Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too?" Gary says he doesn't know. "What was the most exciting thing you saw?" I ask. "I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'." "Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say. "Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet." "The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask. "That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe." "Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?" "I guess so," says Gary. "What were the ship names?" "I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect." This was November 2000. By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, "which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke 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." So while Tamsin was trying to get on with her new relationship, Gary was in the living room of her aunt's house, hacking. He snooped around all the Forts - Fort Meade, Fort Benning, etc - reading internal court martial reports of soldiers getting imprisoned for rape and murder and drug abuse. At the Johnson Space Centre he spied on photographs of cigar-shaped objects that might have been UFOs but - he says - were probably satellites. "You end up lusting after more and more complex security measures," he says. "It was like a game. I loved computer games. I still do. It was like a real game. It was addictive. Hugely addictive." It was never really politically motivated. The most political he's ever got is to attend a Noam Chomsky lecture. A John Pilger book sits on the coffee table next to his bed. Yes, he was hacking in the immediate aftermath of September 11, but only because he wanted to see if there was a conspiracy afoot. "Why did the building fall like a controlled series of explosions? " he says. "I hate conspiracy theories, so I thought I'd find out for myself." "And did you find a conspiracy?" I ask. "No," he says. He strenuously denies the justice department's charge that he caused the "US military district of Washington" to become "inoperable". Well, once, he admits, but only once, he inadvertently pressed the wrong button and may have deleted some government files. "What did you do then?" "I thought, 'Ooh, bloody hell,' " he says. "And that's when I stopped for a while. And then my friend told me about Darpa. And so I started again." Darpa is the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, an intriguing collection of brilliant military scientists, funded by the Pentagon. Darpa has been widely credited with inventing, among other things, the internet, the global positioning system, the computer mouse, and - somewhat more boneheadedly - FutureMAP, an online futures market designed to predict assassinations and bombings by encouraging investor speculation in such crimes. The US Senate once described FutureMAP as "an unbelievably stupid idea". Darpa has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists because it is semi-secretive, bizarre (they have put much effort into creating a team of telepathic spies) and occupies that murky world that lies between science and war. Gary heard from a friend that Darpa might have invented a robot soldier, so he hacked in and claims he found evidence of "an autonomous machine that would go in and do the dirty work. These things could go upstairs and look for bombs. You wouldn't have to send in real people. And I also found these awful special forces training videos of guys running around, doing close-quarter battle. It was ridiculous. These yellow words would flash on to the video: 'BRUTALITY! REMEMBER BRUTALITY! SHOCK! DOMINATION!' You're thinking, 'Oh my God!' It was like Batman." I tell Gary that I've seen videos like that - incredibly fierce special forces training videos - when I was researching my book about US psychological operations. "It's as if investigative journalism has died," he replies. "That's all I was doing. The only difference between you and me was that you were invited." Gary was caught in November 2002. He says it was inevitable, in retrospect, because he was "getting a bit sloppy". He pauses. "I'd never have envisaged this happening to myself, but I did get a bit megalomaniacal as well. It got a bit silly. I ended up talking to people I hacked into." "Saying 'I'm a hacker'?" "No," he says, "I'd instant message them, using WordPad, with a bit of a political diatribe. You know, I'd leave a message on their desktop that read 'Secret government is blah blah blah.' " They found Gary in the end because he'd used his own email address to download a hacking program called Remotely Anywhere. "God knows why I used my real email address," he says. "I suppose it means I'm not a secretive, sophisticated, checking-myself-every-step-of-the-way type of hacker." On the night before his arrest, Gary had been up playing games. "Maybe I'd been doing a bit of weak, fun hacking, too," he says. "I'd had one hour's sleep, and I woke up completely muddled, and suddenly at the bottom of my bed there was this voice: 'Hello, my name's Jeff Donson from the National High Tech Crime Unit. Gary McKinnon, you're under arrest!' They put Tamsin and me in the meat-wagon. They took my PC, Tamsin's PC, three other computers I was fixing for friends. They went upstairs and took my girlfriend's auntie's daughter's computer." Gary was kept in a police station overnight. Then the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.' I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I said no, she was very, 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy.' " In return, Gary offered a somewhat hare-brained counter deal, via a Virginia public defender. "I made a sort of veiled threat to them. I said, 'You know the places I've been, so you know the stuff I've seen' kind of thing." He pauses and blushes slightly. "That didn't work." "So you were saying, 'If you go heavy on me, I'll tell people what I found'?" "Yeah," he says. "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 ask. "You know," says Gary, "the, uh, Non-Terrestrial Officers. The spaceships. 'The whole world thinks it's cooperating in building the International Space Station, but you've already got a space-based army that you refer to as Non-Terrestrial Officers'." There is a silence. "I had very little evidence," he admits. "It's not a very good bargaining chip at all, really, is it?" Given that the justice department has announced that the information Gary downloaded was not "classified", and he was stoned much of the time, perhaps we can assume that Nasa is not too worried about his "discoveries". I ask Gary what's he's going to do next. He says on Friday he's off to the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, for the London 2600 meeting. He explains that they're known as a hacking group, but really they're a bunch of "unqualified experts who drink lots of beer and tell you all the funky undocumented things you can do with your mobile phones. They wire up PlayStation 2s and X-Boxes to dance mats. They play with technology and bend stuff without breaking it." I ask Gary if they see him as some kind of mythical hero, now that the US government has described him as the biggest military hacker of all time. He says, no, they see him as a complete idiot. And, in some ways, he is indeed a complete idiot. Well, he is a likable and intelligent geeky man who did many, many idiotic things. What he is not, his friends and supporters reckon, is someone who deserves extradition and 70 years in an American jail. They've set up a Free Gary McKinnon website (spy.org.uk/freegary). Gary's never spoken publicly before, but now, with the extradition proceedings, he says there's nothing left open to him. For a while, it crossed his mind he might end up like the computer nerd from WarGames, having a brilliant career working for them. "They need people like me," he says. But that's not going to happen. He's also chosen to talk now because his chances of getting a job have diminished to practically zero. "For the first time in the past few years, I just had a solid work offer," he says. "Game-testing. Which would have been a dream for me. I'm still a big kid like that. I'd love to do that for a job. But now, as a condition of this bail, I'm not allowed to touch the internet. So that was out of the window. So. Yeah. I thought, fuck it." He and Tamsin have split up. He no longer lives in Crouch End but in the nearby, slightly more down-at-heel Bounds Green, and has given up smoking dope. He is not allowed near the internet, not allowed a passport, and spends a lot of time reading and sitting in the pub, awaiting his fate. Nothing much happened in the years since his arrest in 2002 under the Computer Misuse Act - no charges were brought against him in the UK. Then on June 8 this year, he suddenly found himself in front of Bow Street magistrates, the target of extradition proceedings. That's when the panic attacks kicked in again, the horror visions of life in an American jail. He had poked around, he says, but he hadn't broken anything, besides that one inadvertent mistake. He thought he was going to get a year, max. Now they're talking about 70 years. "You know," he says as we finish the interview, "everyone thinks this is fun or exciting. But it isn't exciting to me. It is terrifying." His next extradition hearing is on July 27
UPDATE By Matthew Bayley
A BRITISH computer engineer crippled vital U.S. defence systems in the wake of the September 11 attacks by carrying out the `biggest military hack of all time', a court heard yesterday. From his bedroom in North London, Gary McKinnon - using the name Solo - brought American government networks to their knees by infiltrating systems at the Pentagon, the army, navy and the space agency Nasa, it was alleged. He hacked into 26 U.S. Navy computers, including those at Pearl Harbour and the Earle naval weapons station in New Jersey - responsible for restocking the Atlantic Fleet of more than 1,200 ships, aircraft and nuclear submarines with ordnance and ammunition.
Two weeks after the September 11 terrorist outrages, he put out of action Earle's entire network of more than 300 computers, which are used to monitor the battle-readiness of warships, Mark Summers, a lawyer representing the U.S. government, told an extradition hearing in London. `They were inoperable at a critical time immediately following 11 September 2001 and thereafter left the network vulnerable to other intruders,' he added.
During a later hack, McKinnon left an electronic note comparing U.S. foreign policy to 'government- sponsored terrorism'. He wrote: `It was not a mistake that there was a huge security standdown on September 11 last year. I am Solo. I will continue to disrupt at the highest level.'
The Americans, who want him to face trial in the U.S., say he set out to 'disrupt and intimidate' the authorities and caused more than £400,000 worth of damage. Bow Street magistrates court in central London heard how McKinnon-who claims he was looking for secret evidence of UFOs - accessed 97 U.S. government computers between February 2001 and March 2002.
`His conduct was intentional and calculated to influence and affect the U.S. government by intimidation and coercion,' said Mr Summers.
McKinnon got into the American networks via the Internet by identifying U.S. government network computers with an open Microsoft Windows connection, he added.
He stole passwords to the systems before installing remote access software to allow him to get back into the computers any time while hiding what he was doing.
It meant he was able to scan more than 73,000 American government computers for other networks to hack into.
He `levered' himself from network to network and into 97 computers throughout the U.S., the court was told.
These included 53 U.S. Army computers, among them those based at the Pentagon and those used for national defence and security at the Fort Myer and Fort McNair military bases in Virginia and Washington DC.
McKinnon deleted system files on nine computers at the two bases in February 2002 `significantly disrupting governmental function,' the court heard.
Mr Summers said: `Deletion of these files shut down the entire U.S. Army's Military District of Washington network of over 2,000 computers for 24 hours.'
Another computer network at Fort Myer was left inoperable after he deleted 2,455 user accounts, he added. McKinnon is also said to have breached 16 Nasa computers between September 5, 2001 and October 13, 2002, as well as one Department of Defence computer and one U.S. Air Force computer.
The engineer - who faces 20 hacking charges and could be jailed for 70 years - also copied files, account names and passwords on to his own computer, the court heard. It is alleged he obtained passwords or information which might become `indirectly useful to an enemy'.
In 2002 he was tracked down to the home he shared with his then girlfriend in Wood Green, North London, and his computers were seized. He was questioned and then arrested in June this year.
McKinnon is said to have ' admitted he had targeted highlevel U.S. army, navy and air force computers, but has claimed in an inter4ew that he was looking for evidence &UFOs in classified files.
However, his claim is contested by the U.S. Justice Department.
`His ultimate goal was to gain access to the U.S. military classified information network,' said Mr Summers. McKinnon is contesting the extradition request, claiming the U.S. should first sign an extradition treaty.
The Bow Street hearing was adjourned until October 18 and District Judge Nicholas Evans allowed McKinnon bail. But he must report to his local police station twice a week and must not apply for any international travel documents or use any computer equipment allowing him to access the Internet. McKinnon was initially indicted in 2002 by a U.S. federal grand jury on eight counts of computer-related crime in 14 different states. The case is being taken extremely seriously by the American military, which has been a prime target of computer hackers for more than a decade. The September 11 attacks raised to unprecedented heights fears of an assault on critical IT systems. If successful, McKinnon's extradition would be the first from Britain to America in an international hacking case.
|
