Gary McKinnon seems to be one of the most successful hackers of this century, so far. For years he was breaking into different government computers and poking around in places that were considered top secret. When you consider what this man has done, it makes everything you do on line seem vulnerable doesn't it? So who is this guy? He was known as Solo in that vaporous world of geeky hackers. McKinnon was born in Scotland and was a computer systems administrator, but had a lot of time on his hands since he was unemployed. Why McKinnon thought that it would be fun to hack U.S. government sites is beyond me. Everyone knows that after 9/11 the government is even more vigilant. Having said this, it did take years to catch him. It seems that he was able to get into just about all of our military sites. I am not talking about the ones that are open to the public, I am talking about top secret sites that contain ultra secret data on them. These were not the only sites he broke into, there were many others such as secret NASA sites and who knows what else.

Maybe he thought that since he was in a different country that nothing would happen to him? If this is what he thought, he should have figured out that one of the countries that the U.S. has the closest relations with is Great Britain. He may be a very smart hacker, but he seems to lack insight into how governments operate. Another reason that he might not have been too worried could have been the fact that he was caught in the past and told he was going to get community service for his crimes. From what they are printing now, he is going to get extradited to the U.S. and faces 70 years in prison and fines of millions of dollars. Some say that he is extremely worried about being sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He hacked over 53 secret sites in 2001 and 2002.

So what was he looking for in particular, if anything? He states that he wanted to know the truth about ufos, or that can at least be implied by his different statements. While looking into the disaster of 9/11, he states that he became very suspicious. He thought about all the unanswered questions including why all the evidence was taken away so quickly. He wanted to know why all the wreckage was sold to China. He also wondered, he said, about the terrorist schools he claimed were American run for Latin Americans. He claims that there is much technology that is being kept from the public and he has found references to it on different government sites. If one were to take his word without reservation then we would have to believe that we have had antigravity for awhile and a free source of power known as zero point energy.

In one of his interviews he stated that he had talked with a NASA employee that airbrushed ufos out of photographs. He goes on to state that there were files on the NASA site that he had hacked, that had processed and unprocessed photos. He said that he was disconnected before he could download any because he was on an ordinary phone line. I guess we all know how long it takes to download hi resolution photos on a phone line. Can you imagine spending 20 minutes or more trying to download something on a government site that you broke into? That seems to me to be just asking to be caught. He also claims that he found a spreadsheet that contained a list of "Non-Terrestrial Officers." He said that these people were not on any other lists nor could they be found any where else. This sort of ties in with my long held theory that we have a second, military space program that is far in advance of the civilian one. If you come to this site often, you will know that I speak about this every once in a while.

The burning question here is, is McKinnon telling the truth? The government apparently feels that motivation for his crimes are not important, the important thing is that he hacked top secret government sites. Since McKinnon was caught, did he feel that he would receive more sympatric treatment pretending to be a guy that just hacked sites to find out about ufos than if he were a spy? This certainly is a possibility. I never seem to read much about his contacts. He has said, in the past, that he was not part of the hacker community. As this case is tried we might find out a lot more about McKinnon that we didn't know, but on the other hand, everything may be kept secret due to the nature of the crimes. I don't think the U.S. government wants anyone to know exactly how he hacked into their sites or what he truly found. For all we know, he may have been contacted already and told that things might go easier for him if he doesn't talk about certain things that he found.

So we caught McKinnon who got into supposedly uncrackable sites, but is there an army of hackers out there doing this on a regular basis? Are entire countries hacking our sites? Despite what McKinnon says, there is always the possibility that he told others how he hacked these sites and what he truly found. Even if we take the best scenario and he was just a lone hacker, every leak is a threat to national security. The man states that he was addicted to hacking sites and this may be true. There are people addicted to gambling, drugs and alcohol so why not hacking? Addiction or not, this is like the case where a person was murdered by mistake by a drug addict trying to rob them for money to buy drugs. He didn't think that he hit the person hard enough to kill them, but the person was still dead. The sites were still hacked and secret information was compromised. Should mercy be shown to McKinnon or should he be made an example of? This is not up to us to decide but the government. All I know is that I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.