#clog

It all started when an unemployed British sysadmin decided he wanted to get to the bottom of the whole UFO phenomenon, and find out whether strange craft sighted over UK skies for many years were in reality experimental military aircraft belonging to the United States military.

Gary McKinnon would get smoked up, fire up a perl script that scanned for blank admin passwords for machines with publically available military IP addresses, and then log onto the boxes with a VNC-style application and snoop around. Hardly hacking, but that hasn’t stopped the United States calling it the “Biggest hack of all time”

He even explained in an interview with the BBC that while he was logged onto the machines he could see plenty of people from around the world “hacking” in with blank passwords.

Instead of thanking him for exposing the shockingly awful security on machines that, the military claim, are full of information that could threaten the security of their country, the Americans instead called up London and demanded he be extradited to America.

In the past this would have required the Americans to present actual evidence in a UK court before getting their hands on someone, but not anymore. Thanks to a treaty to deal with those evil-doing terrorists, America can get anyone they want extradited from the UK, simply by lodging a request. Of course, this is not a reciprocal agreement, and so the UK must still present evidence in an American court if, God forbid, they want to have someone brought the other direction across the pond.

While there has been great interest among technologists in the UK, in a large part due to the fact that this wasn’t even a real hacker, just someone who got onto machines that some idot in the US military left without passwords, the media has generally taken the line that he is a dangerous man akin to Magneto from the X-Men. The same media has now taken up the cause of three Natwest bankers who are being extradited to America to face trial for alledgedly being involved in the Enron scandal.

Still, even if the terrorists are still coming to get us, at least we’re safe from computer hobbyists and accountants, phew!