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An Anonymous Coward writes:

How conspiracy theories led to the hacking of NASA servers and ruined a sysadmin's life: Gary McKinnon's story [gagadget.com]

He was looking for aliens - and became the No. 1 enemy of the state for the United States and started a diplomatic war between the United States and the United Kingdom

It's a good article with photos. Unlike most of the older articles covering Gary, this article was published 14.05.2025.

Imagine an IT guy who wanted to find traces of UFOs and instead found himself at the centre of the most high-profile hacking case of the 2000s. In 2002, Gary McKinnon, an ordinary sysadmin from Scotland, broke into NASA and the Pentagon computers under the nickname Solo. The United States immediately called it "the largest military hack of all time" and squeezed the most out of this formula - media, diplomatically, legally.

Ten years of trials, extradition requests, an autism diagnosis, an activist mother, hysteria around human rights, conspiracies, spaceships - all this is not a Netflix scriptwriter's invention, but a real story of a British man who just wanted to know if the US government was really hiding information about aliens.

Original Submission