Tim Yang’s Weblog

Cnet has an interesting story of Gary Mckinnon a London guy who managed to bypass the security of the Department of Defense as well as the NASA computers. And he got caught for it. But his story takes an interesting turn after that.

He makes the distinction between bypassing and hacking because he insists he merely found a “blank system level administrator password” and didn’t cause a breach to happen. Yet he is fighting an extradition order that accuses him of “hacking and causing damage to federal defense systems”. Causing damage is another point of contention. The U.S. Department of Justice have all but labelled him a terrorist and accuse him of willful destruction of irreplaceable information. But the way that Mckinnon tells it, that as he was leaving the system, the damage was accidental and that the damage was far less than what the Americans accuse him of. In other words, Mckinnon is being demonised and made a patsy for things he had nothing to do with. There’s more information on the Free Gary Mckinnon blog.