Curiosity Indicted the Hacker
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We've all heard the proverb "curiosity killed the cat", well, this could be applied to any situation in which one's curiosity not only gets the best of them, but inevitably results in irreversible consequences.Such as in the case of UK citizen Gary McKinnon, who is being indicted by the US military for causing damage to their equipment when he hacked into their network, which wasn't password protected, a tragic, fallible error on the part of the military.
They shouldn't be attempting to indict Mr McKinnon. They should be thanking him. What's worse? Getting hacked by a hacker who merely wants to satisfy his insatiable curiosity, or by a terrorist who could capitalise on that knowledge?
If you visit the third link, which is an interview between Mr McKinnon and Spencer Kelly from the BBC, you'll see he describes his program as:
Unlike the press would have you believe, it wasn't very clever. I searched for blank passwords, I wrote a tiny Perl script that tied together other people's programs that search for blank passwords, so you could scan 65,000 machines in just over eight minutes.
I bolded the blank password part. It's curious that he says he was using a program that seeks out blank passwords and not pre-existing ones. If he got in, it would then mean that the military's network security isn't totally l33t.
GM: Yes, I'd always be juggling different time zones. Doing it at night time there's hopefully not many people around. But there was one occasion when a network engineer saw me and actually questioned me and we actually talked to each other via WordPad, which was very, very strange.
SK: So what did he say? And what did you say?
GM: He said "What are you doing?" which was a bit shocking. I told him I was from Military Computer Security, which he fully believed.
What more, I find it very interesting that the decision regarding the fate of Mr McKinnon isn't being decided based on the evidence from the US military, but rather on whether or not it is democratically legal to extradite a UK citizen to be tried in the USA.
The understandable fear is that Mr McKinnon will have the fate of a "terrorist" and wind up in Gitmo. There have been assurances that he would be tried by a federal court in Virgina.
Mr McKinnon has been charged with breaking in to a series of US military and government computer networks between February 2001 and March 2002. The US alleges that during his hacking spree he caused $700,000 (£375,235) of damage. One network he damaged took more than a month to repair, says the US.
"If he really wanted to damage the US military he had ample opportunity to do that," said the editor of the Free Gary blog, pointing out that Mr McKinnon had access to the networks for a long time before he was caught.
However, said the blog co-ordinator, none of this evidence had been presented to a British court to scrutinise. Instead UK courts considering Mr McKinnon's case have been debating the legality of the US extradition request.
This will only sell out the UK's sovereignty rights. They aren't the subbordinate of the US; they had teeth at one time and if they still did, they'd try Mr McKinnon in his home country. He was on UK soil when he hacked into the US military network after all...
Free Gary McKinnon - Or, at least let him be tried in the UK, and I agree. Everyone has a right to be tried in their home country, unless there is reasonable grounds on which to try someone in a foreign nation.
McKinnon supporters fight on
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1 Comments:
This situation is remarkably similar to the Kevin Mitnick case about 10 years ago. Mitnick broke into many corporate networks and downloaded a lot of proprietary data, but didn't sell it or pose any real threat. He was just curious.
His fate was really terrifying. He was severely smeared in the NY Times by a particular journalist, John Markoff, who preyed on Mitnick many times to further his own career. It's suspected that his prosecutors used this fearmongering to scare the jury into giving him an overinflated sentence - prosecutors made the jury believe Mitnick could whistle into a phone to launch nuclear missiles!!
But WHILE AWAITING TRIAL, this chubby, college-educated computer nerd went to a maximum security prison with violent criminals FOR 3 YEARS. 3 friggin years in jail without a trial. He was even sent to solitary confinement for 10 months despite his uncharacteristicly good behaviour. When he was released years later he was banned from using any computer or cell phone for a year, and forced to live under constant surveiliance.
The most serious of his charges was that he copied the source code of a Sun operating system. Sun claimed he'd caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damages even though he only copied it and didn't remove or delete anything. A couple of months after Mitnick was incarcerated, Sun released the operating system and its source to the world for free!!!
So America feels seriously threatened by hackers because they are dangerously undereducated and overconfident in their government. It's simply fingerpointing from a weak nation who brags about grasping at the nearest straws while the real problems loom right over their heads. It's all about keeping up appearances, operating under the guise of control when in fact it is obviously a lone British man who held all the marbles.
Regardless of what happens to Gary, he stands as a figurehead, or maybe martyr, of the left wing. America is so drunk on control that they've enacted more restrictions than they can enforce. When the government and military can be thwarted by a single man - A HOBBYIST - on the other side of the planet, how can they fool anyone into thinking that their fascist republic keeps them safe with wiretaps and spies? The people really do have the power.
Star Wars says it best - "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Brian Damage, at 2:23 p.m.
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