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RE: NASA hacker pleads to Bush for pardon

Anonymous Benefactor 17th Jan 2009

This is an absolute joke. According to McKinnon, he gained admin status on the computers via modems which weren't supposed to be connected, and lazy administrators who left the default passwords on. He then looked at satellite pictures of NASA which were unprocessed. He got caught, end of story. How can looking at sat pictures cause over a million dollars in damage??? At most, the cost of patching the systems to prevent him and others from intruding again is about the administrators salary for a months worth of work, far less than the cost of him "destroying" every machine he logged on to.

This is a clear case of government extortion - someone is attempting to make McKinon pay for the obvious security upgrades which involved destroying the old system. Thus the claim that "he destroyed every machine he logged on to". Since he is UK citizen, it makes him an easy target - if it were a US citizen, there would be outrage.