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The NASA hacker: Scapegoat or public enemy?

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• Hacking NASA

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 13 Jul 2005 13:35 BST

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Surely all the data was backed up anyway?
Well, it should be and it should be behind a firewall, and the local administrator should not have a blank password. Take one defence computer where they use image-based installation techniques where most of the machines have the same BIOS, the same hard drive, the same hardware specification and you just whack it out across the systems. Unfortunately for them, the local system administrator's password was blank. So you don't even need to become the domain administrator. That's 5,000 machines all with a blank system level administrator password. To be fair to them, as I got deeper into it they closed me down pretty quickly.

Did it worry you, this lack of protection for systems?
I was always very frightened when I realised there were always other people from all over the world on there. These were like foreign ISPs, routinely going through things. It is very worrying that it is the world's only superpower and it is that easy to breach security.

What were you doing prior to the most recent arrest?
I wanted to get the trailing documentation. I looked at things and I didn’t like what I was seeing. They talk about the war on terror and meanwhile they are training people in torture techniques, breaking and entering and close-quarter fighting and these are all little South American dictatorships. And then there is the humanist angle of anti-gravity technology and the 9/11 thing, but that didn’t get very far.

Was your main motivation the search for extra-terrestrials?
That is how it started off and it then grew into suspicions about 9/11, because there are hundreds of unanswered questions about 9/11, the dragging away of all the forensics evidence, and the sale of all the concrete and steel to China. Even the firemen of New York organised their own web site to complain that this isn’t a proper process. Then there are the schools for terrorists run by America to help Latin-American dictatorships and stuff.

So when you were searching for extraterrestrial life how did you feel about it? Was it just fun?
It was mainly very, very boring. You had to trawl through so much and bear in mind that it wasn’t publicly accessible Web sites, it was all private military Web sites. So it was about logistics, support and, basically, as soon as I controlled a network I ran a file-searching program looking for keywords in files. So it was exciting every time you did turn up something, which only happened a few times, that was very exciting. I called it research, but it is a bit of a misnomer really.

Was the fun part just in being where you are not supposed to be?
Yes. There is a definite illicit thrill that didn't last very long. The issues around the UFO thing, as I discovered more and learned more, became much more serious. Eventually it became all about the issue of suppressed technology. I know for a fact that they have antigravity and the basic quantum-physical mechanics of having antigravity imply a free source of energy, getting energy direct from the vacuum. Now to me that would stop all the wars over oil. It would help fight famine and with irrigation. It would be free energy and that is a huge thing.

So the US has have developed an antigravity device?
Yes. Recently, I think two years ago, Boeing Aerospace announced that they were putting $50m (£28m) into investigating antigravity research. For me, the timing was interesting because I think it is something they already have, but it’s not general knowledge and if they were caught they would probably say that it was renegade factions high-up in NASA, high-up in the military and high-up in commerce.

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