Gary has claimed he was doing this all via dial-up. Personally, I find that hard to believe, but I went to help my neighbor with some computer issues
the other day and sure enough, he was also on a dial-up, so I guess people do still use modems...
Being that he was on dial-up, his access was rather slow.
The way he explained how he got access was basically remoting into machines that had not administrator password. He is clear about not making any
changes while he slipped in and out, but I got a feeling he mighta secured his ability to reconnect in some way...still, I doubt this'd cause any
real damage as much as waste thousands in taxpayer dollars as overpaid military security analysts attempted to discover the extend of their screw
up.
Gary talks about seeing a manifest for off-world military personnel and what appeared to be ship to ship transfer lists.
The most tantilizing would have been the instance where he claims to have connected to an image processing machine that had a "processed" and
"unprocessed" folder for the proprietary and too big to transfer via dialup files. So, Gary opened one of the unprocessed images and as the screen
was refreshing was apparently when his connection was cut off. He says he saw part of the image and that is was obviously a space craft not of human
design(or it didn't look so to him).
Essentially, that is all he divulged in an interview I had seen taken with him.
Gary was clear that he didn't really know where he was specifically as he surfed around from machine to machine, but that the image was most
certainly on a NASA machine, I believe...so that leaves the manifest in question. Who's to say what he saw wasn't some piece of fiction a
staffmember at NASA was putting together for a book or somehting else?
His story is so cryptic and what he says he saw seems so insignificant...I really think this is just the government trying to make an example of Gary
to others that might consider using his methods of exploiting extremely lax security.
You may be right, though. Maybe he did see something important only he doesn't realize just how important it really was. Nothing he has mentioned
seems all that profound to me. Then again, maybe he's downplaying what he really found?
In any case, I think the punishment is extremely disproportionate.
The institutions hiring these numbnuts who didn't secure their admin user should have been fired.
My dad used to work for the EFF, so I've gotten used to seeing this kind of injustice.
edit to add a link to the inverview I saw:
Here it is
Pay no mind to the site content. It is Gary's words we are after.
[edit on 9-9-2008 by 4N6310]