Hacker fears 'UFO cover-up'
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
Watch the interview
In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK's national high-tech crime unit, after being accused of hacking into Nasa and the US military computer networks.
He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology.
excerpt:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/4977134.stmSK: How did you go about trying to find the stuff you were looking for in Nasa, in the Department of Defense?
GM: 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.
SK: So you're saying that you found computers which had a high-ranking status, administrator status, which hadn't had their passwords set - they were still set to default?
GM: Yes, precisely.
SK: Were you the only hacker to make it past the slightly lower-than-expected lines of defence?
GM: Yes, exactly, there were no lines of defence. There was a permanent tenancy of foreign hackers. You could run a command when you were on the machine that showed connections from all over the world, check the IP address to see if it was another military base or whatever, and it wasn't.
The General Accounting Office in America has again published another damning report saying that federal security is very, very poor.