The Glasgow-born systems administrator who attended Highgate Wood Secondary School in north London, is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force. The US estimates claim the costs of tracking and correcting the problems he allegedly caused were around $700,000, but he has always denied causing any damage, argued he accessed open, unsecured machines, and disputes the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offense. While it did not constitute evidence of destruction, he did admit leaving a diatribe on one computer:

"US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days... It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year... I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels."

McKinnon was originally tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) in 2002 who informed him that he would face community service. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to charge him. Later that year he was indicted by the United States government. McKinnon remained at liberty without restriction for three years until June 2005 (after the UK had implemented a new extradition treaty with the US) when he became subject to bail conditions including a requirement to sign in at his local police station every evening, and to remain at his home address at night. In addition, he was banned from using a computer with access to the Internet. There have been no more developments in respect of the charges relating to United Kingdom legislation but in late 2005 the United States began extradition proceedings.

If he is extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon faces up to 70 years in jail and has expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay. He continues to contest the extradition proceedings and believes that he should face trial in the UK, principally as he argues that the destruction allegations are fraudulent and that any alleged crimes were committed there and not in the United States.

Representing McKinnon in the House of Lords on 16 June 2008, David Pannick QC told the Law Lords that the prosecutors had said McKinnon faced a possible 8-10 years in jail if he contested the charges (there were seven counts), but only 37-46 months if he co-operated and went voluntarily to the US. McKinnon also claimed that he had been told that he could serve part of his sentence in the UK if he co-operated. He had rejected the plea bargain offer as no guarantee had been given by the Americans.

Pannick said that the Law Lords could deny extradition if there was an abuse of process: "If the United States wish to use the processes of English courts to secure the extradition of an alleged offender, then they must play by our rules."[19] The House of Lords rejected this argument, with the lead judgement (of Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood) holding that extradition proceedings should "accommodate legal and cultural differences between the legal systems of the many foreign friendly states with whom the UK has entered into reciprocal extradition arrangements". McKinnon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights, but the appeal was rejected.

On 23 January 2009, McKinnon won permission from the High Court to apply for a judicial review against his extradition.

So Who Is This Guy?

In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie War Games at his local cinema in Crouch End, north London. This film created his interest in computers and computer networks and was ironically prophetic of events that would take over Gary's life. Born in Glasgow in 1966, Gary spent some time growing up in Falkirk, Scotland which is close to the infamous Bonnybridge UFO sighting hotspot. Gary's stepfather also encouraged his interest in science fiction books and UFOs generally - giving Gary the impetus to join BUFORA in his teens.

Somewhat frustrated by the common avenues of UFO research, Gary began some basic computer hacking techniques from his girlfriend's Aunt's house in the mid-late 1990s. Soon he began using a system of scanning for blank administrator passwords on supposedly secure networks and found that on certain occasions this was effective for entering systems that could possibly contain information on the UFO and free energy phenomena. A major catalyst for his research was the information he heard about via Dr. Steven Greer's Disclosure Project. Gary claimed one of the reasons he was looking for validation was that "in the UK old age pensioners are dying each winter because they cannot pay their fuel bills..." - the implication being that above-government agencies are keeping highly efficient sources of power, possibly derived from alien hardware, to themselves. The Disclosure Project witness statements also contained reference to photo retouching work done in building 8 of the Johnson Space Centre. McKinnon also made some attempt to confirm this testimony by Donna Hare, a former employee. Hare insisted that NASA was retouching photographs of the lunar surface, airbrushing out “anomalies” such as flying saucers.

By the time his home was raided in 2002, it is claimed that Gary had penetrated a range of secure networks including NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defence and the US Air Force. Gary claims to have found evidence of photographic or satellite images being retouched before public distribution - he claims that in building 8 he found PC directories with 'before' and 'after' airbrushed images and located pre-tampered images of anomalous objects casting shadows onto the earth surface. However the information that has caused the biggest stir in the Exopolitical communities was Gary's claim to have seen documentary evidence of what could be alternative space programs. This controversial element to the case was based on Gary allegedly finding spreadsheet data relating to 'non-terrestrial officers' and 'fleet-to-fleet transfers'. Gary found names of "ships" listed in this data and separately researched these names against military sea-based vessels but found no correlation. We have only Gary's testimony on these issues as he used a dial-up connection that was too slow to download any images or documentation. The software merely replicated a low resolution version of the remote PC's content on his PC. At one point Gary claims an official at one of the organisations questioned him via a text editor to which Gary claimed he was a technician 'checking for security issues'. On another occasion he claims the his activity was noticed and the connection terminated. An important point raised by McKinnon's supporters is why he alone was targeted. It appears that throughout the many networks he explored there were in fact many other IP addresses that had also gained access, many of which originated in places like China.

After being traced by his purchase of 'Remotely Anywhere' - the software McKinnon used to replicate networked computer contents on his own PC, he was arrested by the UK's then recently formed National Hi-Tech Crime Unit. No charges were brought against McKinnon in the UK, but authorities in the US started extradition proceedings against him. These have continued to this day and may continue for several years yet. In 2003 Britain signed a new United States. This legislation is the notorious Extradition Act, which was passed by the Labour Government after Gary was arrested in 2002. This new treaty included far fewer safeguards for British citizens. Under the previous arrangement, the US government would be required to present evidence in a British court that a crime had been committed. A British judge would review the evidence and make a decision on whether or not extradition should take place. Under the new treaty, however, none of this happened. Extradition was almost automatic. It has been suggested that what Gary is accused of is not necessarily serious crime especially regarding the alleged amount of financial damage. His legal team maintain that the UK Computer Misuse Act 1990, also covers computer "hacking" in foreign countries from the UK, and should therefore should take precedence.

For these reasons and more, the exopolitical field are supporting the case on a human rights issue as much as anything else. 

Civilian efforts in support of McKinnon

In early November 2008, a total of 20 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for any custodial sentence imposed by an American court to be served in a prison in the UK.

In mid-November the rock group Marillion announced that it was ready to participate in a benefit concert in support of Gary McKinnon's struggle to avoid extradition to United States. Organiser of the planned event Ross Hemsworth, an English radio host, has also inquired such names as David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, U2 and David Bowie. No date has been set yet.

In a major Op/Ed in The Herald newspaper of Scotland Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr.,a retired NASA Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent, joined the chorus of support for Gary McKinnon. Gutheinz, who is also an American criminal defense attorney and former Member of the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments, opined that Gary McKinnon could not find justice if extradited to America from England, because of America’s poor track record in choosing to aggressively prosecute offenders with mental impairments. Gutheinz was especially concerned that McKinnon affliction with Asperger's syndrome would not be dealt with sympathetically by the American criminal justice system. Gutheinz said, that as an attorney, he represented a young defendant with Asperger's syndrome in the past, in an American criminal case.

Statements to the media

During the length of time between his indictment and beginning of extradition proceedings, with a growing media interest in his case, Gary McKinnon has had a number of opportunities to address the media.

In an interview televised on the BBC's Click programme, he claimed that he was able to get into the military's networks simply by using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords; in other words his report suggests that there were computers on these networks with the default passwords active.

At the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference in London on April 27, 2006, McKinnon appeared on the Hackers' Panel. When asked how his exploits were first discovered, McKinnon answered that he had miscalculated the timezone — he was using remote-control software to operate a Windows computer while its user was sitting in front of it.

McKinnon has admitted in many public statements to unauthorised access of computer systems in the United States including those mentioned in the United States indictment. He claims his motivation, drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on May 9, 2001 by the "The Disclosure Project", was to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and the suppression of "Free Energy", all of which he claims to have proven through his actions.

In his interview with the BBC he also claimed that "The Disclosure Project" says there is "extraterrestrial in origin and [they've] captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it." He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert's claim that at the Johnson Space Center's Building 8 images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this comparing the raw originals with the "processed" images. He claimed to have viewed a detailed image of "something not man-made" and "cigar shaped" floating above the northern hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted owing to the hour, he did not think of capturing the image because he was "bedazzled", and therefore did not think of securing it with the screen capture function in the software RemotelyAnywhere at the point when his connection was interrupted. McKinnon stated the image was approximately 256 megabytes in size, yet that the craft's details were still distinct in the greatly inferior 4-bit color and low resolution he had to reduce the viewing image to to appear across his mere 56k modem connection (approximate transfer rate 5 minutes/megabyte).

The charge that he perpetrated "the biggest military hack of all time" is ridiculed by McKinnon who characterises himself as a "bumbling computer nerd" who undestructively accessed open, unsecured machines while under the influence of cannabis and beer, and that the destruction claims were manufactured by embarrassed US authorities after the fact in order to meet a dollar amount requisite to seek an extradition, in order to make him a poster child and intimidate any snoopers, especially those interested in the alien technology subjects he believed the public had a moral right to be aware of. He contrasted his viewing of unsecured information with incidents of real, non-passive security-disrupting or destructive cracking, including when in May 2001 as acknowledged by U.S. government contractor Exigent International one or more hackers broke into a U.S. government server storing satellite software and stole code. Evidence in that case led investigators to an e-mail service in Sweden but the culprits were never apprehended. In 1997, two California teenagers and a trio of Israeli hackers were arrested for cracking into Pentagon servers. Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum, then 18 years old, and his two teenage accomplices were not extradited, but were prosecuted by local authorities. McKinnon stated that on many occasions he noticed numerous other users from various global IP addresses accessing the same machines at the same time. The U.S. Pentagon has for example in the past cited as many as 250,000 hostile attacks in a single year.

Advantages of trial in the UK

One significant advantage of a trial in the UK from McKinnon's perspective would be the availability of jury equity, that is, a decision by which a jury of peers absolves a defendant from all criminal liability, irrespective of whether criminal law would dictate a different result. McKinnon's controversial statements about the existence of 'publicly sensitive' information on hacked US servers would be one strategy of winning the favour of a prospective jury in the UK. For a successful application of the legal stratagem refer to the Clive Ponting case.

NASA documents

In 2006, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed to NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon. NASA's documents consisted of printed news articles from the Slashdot website, but no other related documents. This is consistent with NASA employees browsing internet articles about Gary McKinnon, the records of which are public domain.

Radio play

On December 12, 2007, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a 45 minute radio play about the case, The McKinnon Extradition by John Fletcher.[29] It was rebroadcast on September 2, 2008.