☄️2007 UFO Crash Con

In 2007 Matthew Williams gave a talk on Gary at the 5th UFO Crash Retrieval Conference.

Video of the accompanying lecture whose content is different from the below proceedings is available on Matthew's YouTube. Interview ©2007 Matthew Williams. Reprinted with permission. Source.

A Close Encounter With Whistleblower Gary McKinnon

by Matthew Williams

This is a transcript of an October 2007 interview with Gary McKinnon and Matthew Williams.

MW: Basically if I could start with name and age. How you got into computers is a good place to start.

GM: Age is 41.

MW: How did you start in being interested in technology and computers?

GM: Well Atari games console firstly and playing games and then Atari brought out one that you could program and it had the BASIC programming language so you could learn how to program games. It had a cartridge slot in the top and a membrane keypad. That was my first attempt at programming and then I learned assembler language. Then there was the Atari ST and you could do music on that. Then about 1994 I got my first PC.

MW: What prompted you to get into a job in computers, were you good at school?

GM: No I was crap academically, I had one O' Level in English and a few CSE's but someone said to me one day, you're very good at computers why don't you do some sort of course at it and you can make some good money out of it. As I didn't have any qualifications to speak of I did a Mature Students access course to get on a degree course but I was really crap at high level maths so they bumped me down to the HND course but I was still having trouble with the high level maths up to a certain point. I failed the HND as well.

I had loads of practical experience. The first job I got was installation and configuration and engineering and I was upgrading from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 and to Windows NT. Once you have done one job as a contractor you get more jobs and more experience. So I did it all by experience rather than qualifications.

MW: When would you say you finished in your degree course?

GM: 1991 was the access course and I stuck it till '93 and got my first job in '94 which was for Alphagen which was a MOD supplier amongst other things. At the time none of this stuff was in my mind. They were providing hardware to DERA.

MW: I take it you were living in London at this time. Have you always lived in London?

GM: I was born in Glasgow and left there when I was six and a half.

MW: So your school and HND was all gained in London.

GM: University of North of London. Holloway Road.

MW: How did you get on at school as a background, it's interesting for me to know what sort of a person you are, how did you get on with people at school, etc., did you have many friendships? (I took out the word hacker here replaced with person―as you wouldn't have been a hacker back then.)

GM: I wasn't very academic at school and I loved playing the clown.

MW: I was much the same.

GM: I was always anti-authoritarian. I loved people though, had a lot of friends. I am not quite as gregarious and as outgoing as I used to be.

MW: Were you into social activities or sports?

GM: I was crap at football but I loved running, athletics, and trampolining and stuff.

MW: Did you win any prizes?

GM: I remember winning the highest pole vault once but I didn't get into any events really.

MW: Is there any reason that you didn't do well at your O' Level stage at school? Any illness or things that held you back?

GM: I think it was me mainly. When we were in Glasgow the education system was much better than it is in England I think. When I was six I was doing fractions. I came down here and we were reading Peter and Jane books and so I began to be lazy and I was told that I was bright and I think I kind of believed that and stopped trying. I started to enjoy the social aspect of school and not the academic aspect.

MW: I used to like messing around. I found it more invigorating than the lessons. I am not saying that about you, I am saying that about me. What about girlfriends did you have any at school?

GM: No, that all started after school, teenager years.

MW: What was your family situation like when younger, did they take an interest in your schooling?

GM: My parents split up, that's why my mum came down to London and lived with my step-dad. Yeah, I remember them sitting me down and making sure I did my homework. So that is probably why I did get one O' Level.

MW: Did you not do well at computers at school?

GM: They didn't have any computers at school, unfortunately.

MW: Well, I think you may find they had them but as with many schools I have encountered they hid them away and made sure the kids didn't get on them. That's changed a lot now but back in my day kids weren't deemed worthy to go on them. Often teachers had secret stashes of computers. Was your skill on computers mainly honed by you outside of school?

GM: Yeah I don't think they even had any computer studies at that time. They just started that in my later years at secondary school.

MW: I find it interesting that you could do well at a skill you were interested in such as computers all by yourself but you hadn't done so well at academic subjects. You weren't interested in subjects so much?

GM: Well, I joined the one school because it said on the prospectus that they did sword fencing and I really wanted to do that, sounds childish but I was a child. When I got there I found that the entire sword fencing equipment was in the cupboard and they didn't do sword fencing anymore and so they were lying in their prospectus. However, I love language and I love reading and my other qualifications were French, Art, Maths, and Physics. So I was interested in some but I have this problem where if I am not fully interested it just won't stick. It's being lazy perhaps because you should still be able to apply yourself to remember something even if it doesn't interest you if you know it's going to be of use to you or enhance your life.

MW: How about teacher motivation, if you like a teacher you learn better. Did you find this the case?

GM: Yeah, my Physics teacher was great.

MW: Did you learn much about History or World Politics at school?

GM: Funnily enough in the first year and second year at secondary school there was an amazing teacher named Mr. Elkington who was an amazing history teacher. He wanted us to go out and find burial mounds of the Beaker people and taught us about Buddica and told us that she was in fact called Buddica and not Bodicea, and medieval history. He died whilst we were at school. We then did modern history later on but I found it incredibly boring as it just all seemed to be about politics. I loved Roman history.

MW: I know you have an interest in UFOs from the information in the media about your going into computers to look for hidden information on UFOs. Did you gather this interest whilst young or older―what started your interest off?

GM: My stepfather was from Falkirk which is quire tear Bonnybridge and he had dreams about UFOs constantly as a child and had seen one once. I remember that this heightened my interest. When I was about 12 or 14 years of age I joined BUFORA, the British UFO Research Association. I don't remember specifically reading any books or seeing anything on television about the subject. It must have been my step dad's interest which caused me to become interested. That's quite a young age to join BUFORA between 12 and 14. I used to get a monthly newsletter and we didn't have access to the Internet in those days. It was hard for a kid on pocket money to go buying expensive hardback books.

MW: Had you read any UFO books?

GM: No I don't think I read any UFO books.

MW: Were you a reader of other books? How did you follow TV, did you used to watch sci-fi series?

GM: Yes, I was an avid reader. I think my stepfather's interest in sci-fi meant that I had access to books by Isaac Asimov and Harry Harrison.

MW: Just out of interest which types of things do you like, romantic stuff?

GM: Definitely not romantic stuff. Although having said that, I have got more into stories about people that are real life, things that are above and beyond the call of duty. There was a story about a woman who wen around Bosnia and she was endangering her life. I can't remember what it is called now. I do like a lot of modern sci-fi. I do like a lot of books on real subjects. I am a real admirer of the military strangely enough and the people involved in that. I have a lot of respect for them.

MW: Did you like any specific things about the military? This was at the age of a teenager?

GM: Yes, teenager. Back then I was more interested in the machinery, very boyish I guess, guns and tanks.

MW: Did you ever consider joining the military?

GM: Yes, I did and the police force. I was talked out of that by my parents who told me to get a real job first as they said it was a three to five year period in the military when you join up before you can get out. My dad's dad, my granddad, was an American GI who came over here during the war and got involved with my grandmother and then disappeared again. It might be in my blood in a way.

MW: Do you have any close family who are military or police?

GM: No.

MW: Any famous or well respected family members of note? I'm just curious.

GM: Not that I know of. There might be some ancient Celtic fighting connections perhaps. The only link with the military was my grandmother and my grandfather disappeared off and so my dad was an illegitimate child which in those days was unspeakable, very "oooooh". If I did get extradited perhaps it would be like I was just "going home" in some way. (Laughs)

MW: Have you got many brothers or sisters?

GM: Yes, I was an only child to my parents but when my dad remarried he had a daughter, my half sister. Then he remarried a third time and I've got 3 half brothers.

MW: Has anyone close to you ever got into trouble, got criminal records or have you got a clean slate sensible family around you?

GM: Yeah, they are pretty unremarked. One of my cousins was a bit unruly when he was younger but that's all.

MW: So back in school days did you get into serious trouble for things you did?

GM: Yeah, I got into trouble for ripping up loads of exercise books and sticking the bits on the intake fan of the chemistry lab and turning it on when the teacher came in. Mostly in trouble for pranks.

MW: Were you bullied at all?

GM: I was bullied until I fought back. It took me quite a while though, which was about 1 year of bullying. Which is quite a long time and felt bad at the time and some bad things happened to me.

MW: How did you find the transition from school, like going to your first job? Was it easy for you?

GM: Yeah, it was ok because to me it was all just people. I don't know if it was because I was an only child, I was always feeling very secure. My parents were very loving and I felt well loved, so I had a good emotional grounding I suppose.

MW: Did your parents have good jobs, were you well off?

GM: Not at first in London we didn't have very much and my parents had to shop jobs. We didn't own our own place back so not particularly well off. A stable background though.

MW: In your jobs did you get paid a lot?

GM: Not much but I got into labouring for a while and even hairdressing which was crap money but was fun. I had had a lot of jobs and compared to those the computer work was well paid.

MW: Did you progress in your job?

GM: I did start doing well but then I seemed to come into competition with a lot of newly qualified Microsoft Certified engineers. Still I had the experience, which counts because you can get someone who has done all the exams in the world but still hasn't got the practical experience. The highest I got was Systems Administrator which I had been after for a while and meant I was in charge of 50 users. I loved that because I was chatting to the telecoms guys, the sales guys. I enjoyed that because you feel like your work is underpinning everyone because computers are important to everyone. I really enjoyed that.

MW: So a Systems Administrator is the person who controls access to people's machines and decides what they can do and which bits they can see, creates user names and passwords accounts for people to get in.

GM: That's an aspect of it. More importantly I was looking for ways to ease the workflow. Also I used to set up remote dial-in so managers could access the computers from outside the office. I used to try and impart enthusiasm to people so they weren't afraid of computers so they could use them as a tool.

MW: Did you work as a trainer in teaching people computers?

GM: Yes, very casual training, I wasn't up there with a whiteboard in a classroom scenario. It was one on one. Say a telecom engineer might need to know how to use a particular piece of software when he was out and about, that sort of thing.

MW: Would your job involve any element of security work?

GM: We were connected to the Internet through Demon Internet but we didn't host our own web server so there wasn't a great need for security. We had ISDN at the time. I was in charge of security so I would get people to change their passwords on a monthly basis.

MW: Were you the only person involved in this type of work, did the buck stop with you?

GM: Yes, I was the only one. However, it was a legacy job in that there had been someone there before me and he had run off with a lot of stuff from the company in some form of dispute so most of the systems were already set up by that person and I was just keeping them running more than anything.

MW: Would you have been concerned for intrusions into your system?

GM: Yes, well the director who disappeared and stole loads of hardware had left lots of backdoors into the system for himself and the current directors were very worried that he would be able to gain access. So I did do a big clean up job and I had to analyse his PC to make sure there were no ways he could get in and change the passwords. That's one thing I did like about computer security is the challenge that this is your castle and you have to lock all the gates and pull back the drawbridge.

MW: Did you take security seriously on your systems or did you assume everything was secure?

GM: I took it seriously but I didn't think there was much of a chance of us being a target, which when I think about now is silly because people would say well why would someone want to access my machine. I would tell people that any computer can be used as a jump point for people to be able to send out data from and make it anonymous, make it look like it came from that machine. It might be misused for credit card fraud. Although I did take the security seriously we didn't actually have any threats, but we did have the usual virus problems.

MW: Was it when you were working at this company that you first got your interest in looking for UFO data in the Internet?

GM: Yes, it was in 1999 when I first joined the company and I was looking for stuff then.

MW: Did you stay a BUFORA member?

GM: No, stopped paying my membership after a few years.

MW: Can you describe the way you looked for UFO documents online?

GM: The Internet was a real revolution when it became easily available for people because now instead of paying £20 for a book you could just go on the Internet and download it and view it on screen. I am not sure why the interest resurfaced... Well actually I remember there was a chap I met who mentioned suppressed technologies. Whereas before I had been interested in UFOs as a phenomena, his angle was that UFOs had been captured and reverse engineered and we had all this technology available to a covert few who were outside the government. He was the same chap who introduced me to the "Disclosure Project" (run by Steven Greer).

MW: Did you meet this person via the Internet?

GM: No, I met him in real life, through a job where I was doing Internet tech support; this was in a different earlier job, not the systems admin job. I kept in touch with him and because he knew a lot more about the subject than I did he was my guru so to speak. I researched what I was told via the net. You could download electronic copies of books.

MW: What grade of computer were you using to access this stuff?

GM: Back then a 386 PC.

MW: Was any of this stuff back in those days illicit?

GM: No, at first I was checking out publicly accessible stuff. I remember seeing some documents relating to medical information at Bethesda Hospital.

MW: This was where Secretary of Defense James Forestall committed suicide and is featured in the X-Files a lot.

GM: Funnily enough I was reading about him the other day as his son is still alive and is trying to get some form of reinvestigation so justice can be done. As at the time his family didn't even know what their father was doing for the military.

MW: I seem to remember something about his diaries not being released, classified for reasons of national security. (MW note: I have since now found reference that the diaries are printed in full.)

MW: Where did you get the idea to go looking for harder to find sensitive UFO information on the Internet?

GM: I based most of my research on information that was given out by the Disclosure Project (Steven Greer) and some from documents relating to the Matthew Bevan case. There was a list of supposed UFO hackers who had died and a list of sites they had been trying to get into. There were names of companies like TRW and Raytheon and Lockheed. In fact I might not be remembering TRW correctly. Anyhow I was reading about the Disclosure Project and I was fascinated because at the time they had 300 expert witnesses all of which were ex military, ex government, radar controllers and air traffic controllers all the way up to strategic air command people―men and women who were able to decide whether to launch nuclear missiles. When they come out and say these things why the hell shouldn't we believe them.

I began to get really angry about it. If such serious people were saying we had such advanced technology then we could put it to good use, we could irrigate dry areas of the Sahara, do all sorts of things with that free energy. So I used the information from the Disclosure Project witnesses mainly to do what I termed further research.

I wasn't trying to uncover anything about the hackers' deaths. I was thinking however that if they really were killed then there must be something there worth looking at, coupled with the witnesses from the Disclosure Project.

MW: Did you make any efforts to validate the information was real provided by the Disclosure Project and the information about the hackers?

GM: That's what I was doing, not just the IPs (Internet addresses) as well as trying to find out what the entire network I was on was created for.

MW: Did you find out if the hackers who were supposed to have been killed were real?

GM: I didn't try to research the hackers at all.

MW: Can you say how you went about doing the work of looking into these systems for the information?

GM: Yes sure. You can FTP (Note: File Transfer Protocol―rudimentary way to look at remote machine folders and files). Lots of FTP and Telnets (Telnet―rudimentary way to access computers via commands). I read through lots of pages and watched many hours of the Disclosure Project and whenever anyone mentioned a place name I wrote this down, or a building at a certain place. I harvested little nuggets of data. For example, Donna Hare in the Disclosure Project. She was a NASA photographic expert who prepared mission slides and photographic slides. She said that in building 8 of Johnson Space Center there was a place that she found out from a colleague who had a top secret clearance, was an area that they weren't supposed to have wandered into where they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from high resolution satellite photography, because they are so frequently caught on film and before the images are then sold on to Universities.

Using my blank password scanning technique I got into Johnson Space Center really easily, as there were blank passwords everywhere. In a network of machines the administrators have a comment field where you can see the function of the machine and its location and you can write whatever you want, such as this is the file server or this is the print server and this is in building 8 floor 3, whatever. So I stripped out all of the comment fields that had building 8 in them and did my blank password scanning technique for all those machines and lo and behold the machines there had raw and processed folders in them. These images were over 200 megabytes and I was on a 56k dialup connection and also these images were in a proprietary NASA image format. So there wouldn't be much I could have done with them unless I had the software to view them.

This was my best and worst moment in it all and I still think back with anger because of the way things went. I mean what she [Donna Hare] said was there was there. I wanted to see the images and I had to see them, I had to know! But transferring those files at that size would have taken days so I had an idea. I would look at it on their screen. I did it by taking graphical control of their desktop and turning the colour right down so that it could transfer to my PC quickly. I saw probably about the top two thirds of this picture and I saw what looked like the Earth's hemisphere with woolly clouds but then the structure started to appear and it started to reveal the body of what at first looked like a satellite but then as it revealed more I realised that this looked very different and I was on to something. There didn't appear to be any seams or rivets and no telemetry, no aerials. Just then I saw the mouse move on the screen and it went down to the lower part of the screen and next chose the disconnect command and that was it, that was me out of NASA.

Hats off to NASA they did close off my method of entry in practically no time at all in nearly all of their systems. It was a horrible moment though because it was "eureka" and then instantly I got caught. I think I might have got the time zones confused or something because somebody was actually awake and in the office at the time and they had seen what I was doing. I would have loved to have got a good look at them, to have bee able to have downloaded that whole folder.

MW: A shame you had not got those files. Can you tell me did you consider what you were doing back then in accessing these files to be wrong or illegal?

GM: It didn't feel illegal, not back then. Well I knew it was illegal but at the time just because it was illegal doesn't make it wrong is what I was thinking. Also I thought it was for the greater public good and that I was in the right. I thought crikey this free energy stuff is amazing.

MW: Are you familiar with the term Honeypot, i.e. some systems may be left on the Internet by governments or agencies in order to lure people in with tempting or either fake information so they can track them down.

GM: I know about honeypots and these systems certainly weren't. The machine log on and log off times were all correct and being a systems administrator I could tell that things were correct.

MW: You are sure you would know the difference.

GM: Oh yeah! You wouldn't be threatened with 70 years in prison and 1.75 million dollars in fines for gaining entry to a honeypot!

MW: What would a honeypot contain that might be different to a real system?

GM: A honeypot would be very isolated and you would find yourself on a small subset of the network. You wouldn't be able to access many other machines from the one you first gained a foothold into. There would be documents on there probably some fake email addresses. If I was doing one I would transplant a history from another machine onto this one so it would appear to have a length "up-time" to make it look like people had been working on it. However because I was on a military network I could then access other military networks with a (dot).mil address and I would look like I was coming from the same type of network. I knew I wasn't enclosed, which is the essence of a honeypot, they want to keep you in one place and watch you.

MW: So even though NASA at Johnson building 8, we know that NASA does military tasks like putting stuff in space. So was the NASA site military or public?

GM: The NASA stuff was public and some of the other stuff was military.

MW: Would honeypots really only apply to military systems?

GM: No, I am sure NASA does it as well. NASA network addresses all end in (dot).gov and are government sites. They are supposedly public but infact they are not really they are military organisation really. I'm sure NASA does honeypotting as well.

MW: Do these sites warn you as you log on of potential illegality of unauthorised access or any such similar measures to tell you how these systems should or shouldn't be used?

GM: Well the way I did it initially was through the consoles so there are no graphics and because I knew it was the administrator's account and the password was blank. I would type "net use" then a certain share name on the machine and then password was blank. Once I was logged in to that machine with Administrator level access I could remotely install software on that machine which gave me graphical control. On some machines you would find people already logged on so you didn't get that front screen. Sometimes you would get a logon screen with "This is the property of NASA". It's amazing though because under federal guidelines they should all be like that. You have to let someone know that they could be trespassing otherwise that person may not realise that they have committed a crime. A lot of those machines didn't conform to the federal guidelines and had no warnings in place.

MW: So in some respects one could through quite easy methods wander into these machines without hindrance and be looking around without realising you were doing very much wrong.

GM: If you hadn't spent all night scanning them for the blank passwords in the first place... this is obviously a deliberate act. It's not exactly something you could just happen upon by accident.

MW: Well I am thinking well you could drive into a military base by mistake if the gates were open and there were no signs saying "Military Base", "Keep Out". You could even get to see things you weren't supposed to but how would one know unless someone came up and said, you aren't meant to be here. I could see your looking around like trying lots of gates, and finding one open and going in for a look... was it your fault that these gates were left unlocked with no warning signs on them?

GM: I see your point it's a good analogy.

MW: If one just takes a look and does not harm is this a problem? Is that what you are being charged with? Or are you being charged with alterations, defacement, and damage?

GM: I have been charged with intentional malicious damage on every machine I was on.

MW: Are you able to talk about some of this... is it going to harm your case?

GM: No it's ok.

MW: So what sort of damage?

GM: Well they have kind of redefined damage. Well on one level they have said "impairing the machines ability to perform its normal function" which is rubbish because all I did was log on and install my remote control software which doesn't actually inhibit the machines ability to function in any way.,

Then they go on to say "damage by alteration of data" which refers to the act of installing the remote control software, but I haven't actually damaged their data in any way by doing so, it is an addition to the machine not a damage to their data. I have altered the image of the machine because by installing the software it is not the machine it was before but I have not destroyed data or decrypted data.

MW: So your actions merely appended to the machines purpose, it didn't damage any of their files.

Considering you didn't know you weren't meant to be there would there be any kind of valid case for saying that someone could have any reason to be looking around as you were in any normal circumstances?

GM: There's no way you could innocently stumble upon it.

MW: Do playpen type machines exist where somebody could log in run a bit of software at someone else's machines time or expense? Do such things exist?

GM: There are on Unix machines access via shell accounts to do things. They do exist.

MW: Would you be able to find these systems randomly or would you need prior knowledge and arrangement to use them?

GM: You would need to know about them in advance and have been given an account on them via the owners.

MW: Do you think that it makes a difference that you did this in the US rather than the UK? I know some hackers such as Matthew Bevan (alias Kuji) I have spoken to choose to hack overseas sites because the risk of trouble to the hacker getting caught was considered less if you hack overseas.

GM: It seems sensible but I wasn't really aware of that mechanism at the time. I chose US sites because it was my understanding that their military and defence contractors had the closest links to the UFO subject.

MW: Yeah I think hacker lore says "Never hack your own country".

If you were to let people know you had been into these sites and warn them later on that they had a security hole would you think that this would have meant that your presence there was such a problem? I did hear that you had let some network administrators know you had been there.

GM: Yes, I always used to set a password when I went in to these sites so that nobody else could get in the same way I had done and bother my little operation. Once I had realised that this place was of no viable use I would leave a note on the system administrator's desktop.

MW: What sort of note did you leave them?

GM: I was telling them "Sort your security out".

MW: So you did warn them. Do you think people read them and realize there had been a breach of security?

GM: Well I actually left it open in their WordPad (word processor) so it would be the first thing they saw in the morning.

MW: You didn't leave any details of who you were?

GM: Oh god no. Later on when Afghanistan happened, I started leaving more politically orientated messages for them.

They brought out part of one of my statements and it was part of it which made me look really bad. I would sometimes start off by saying that 9-11 was an inside job and that there was a deliberate stand down of American air defence. I also used to say that it was no fault of American service men or women but the fault of government or covert operations working inside the government. The bit they released from my messages which makes me look bad is from the very end which says "I will continue to disrupt at the very highest level." by which I meant leaving these messages. I was accused of taking down the entire military district of Washington, which one man in his bedroom cannot do, I would expect, hopefully!

MW: Is there any evidence which has been presented to prove you did in fact take down the entire military district of Washington?

GM: No, none.

MW: So how could leaving messages like that take their entire district network down? Is that possible?

GM: Hmmm... I don't think it could. Ermm, it was my way of trying to communicate with those people I felt were the wrongdoers. I was letting them know I had been there and was searching for something and I would find something. I may have been a little bit drunk when I left those messages. It wasn't a good idea really.

MW: So drink was an element in your motivation. You would work during the day and then come home maybe have a drink and then do some hacking?

GM: Well I wasn't drinking every time I hacked. On that particular occasion I referred to I did leave a particularly long political diatribe.

MW: Was it the drink that made you a bit more animated in your message to them and do you regret that?

GM: Well it was very egotistical. I didn't regret it at the time but I regret it now because of how it can look wrong.

MW: I'm still interested how a note left to a system admin can bring down the entire military network in Washington!

GM: Yeah and if it had really happened then why wasn't it in the news. [If] it had gone down then surely something big would have happened or something might have gone wrong.

MW: Did you follow the news to see if perhaps it was reported on?

GM: I didn't but I do remember somewhere like Fort Knox or Fort Belvoir, these were massive systems of something like 5000 PCs and I remember when I was looking there one of those that I saw a military cyber security newsletter saying that they had tracked down and stopped a hacker intruding into their network and it was around the same sort of time that I was there... I wondered if this was me as it was the same time and was the same network.

MW: Did you look for much information like that?

GM: No, not really, because I was maintaining such a quiet presence at the time I didn't think there was any way I would be caught.

MW: So no proof you managed to cripple the Washington system.

GM: When I was arrested in 2002 and the three years between my rearrest I was allowed Internet access. I did not see anything that referred to this alleged incident.

MW: Could it be proven that they military have perhaps exaggerated against you and is making up these claims for getting you extradited.

GM: That's the unfortunate thing is that because it is an extradition hearing they can only deal with the extradition law and can't deal with anything to do with the actual charges. I am not even allowed to speak at these things. You can't defend. However the prosecution can and they are allowed to say "he's done this and that" and you aren't allowed to argue those points.

MW: So the prosecution are allowed to make their claim against you and you are not allowed to defend yourself in this hearing?

GM: Exactly!

MW: Ramsey Clark is some one whose name comes to mind. He is a former Attorney General which is a high ranking legal position and he served under Nixon, I believe. He is now a very big human rights advocate and helps people with awkward cases that need his type of presence to be able to make things happen. He may be able to help you with your case as I know he has helped represent UFO witness Larry Warren to help him get his passport back when the US gov't alleged he was harming national security by speaking about the Bentwaters UFO incident. After Mr. Clark intervened the passport was given back. Perhaps he could help you before you even get to the US. Perhaps even try to dissolve the case before you get called to be extradited. Perhaps people like Steven Greer might be able to suggest extra help you could get.

GM: Steve Greer offered to come to speak at the extradition hearing as an expert witness. I am not sure if it would have been something the court would like having someone talking about UFOs at an extradition hearing.

MW: Well I am not so sure seeing as it is a fundamental part of the case before them, why someone would be motivated to do this sort of computer activity that you did... and to hear from an expert witness that the UFO subject is taken very seriously from a gathering credible evidence point of view might lead someone like yourself to want to look in places that maybe you shouldn't. However, it would probably be your lawyers who would advise on if it would be good or bad for your case. I think it might help to show that your intentions were UFO related with research in mind and not malicious or terrorist in nature.

I assume you would like to work in computers again.

GM: Yes.

MW: What are the current penalties against you if you did get extradited to the US?

GM: 60 years imprisonment and 1.5 million dollars in fines.

MW: That's crazy. Where would someone convicted of a crime get 1.5 million dollars if their life has been ruined? Where would you get 1.5 million dollars if you worked every day of your life? So is it a fine or 60 years?

GM: Actually I think it's both.

MW: So you'll be able to find 1.5 million dollars whilst spending the rest of your natural life in prison? How does that work? I think the US authorities are completely unrealistic in their sentencing procedures.

GM: It's all on a points system as well... it's all just mad.

MW: So how are you managing for money at the moment?

GM: I have had some offers that have said if you come out of all this clean then we will employ you in security. I have also had film offers and book offers but they are holding back until it pans out. They don't want to give me a £15,000 advance until they know that I am going to be able to work with them because I may be off to America. It's working out again though at the moment because I am living with somebody who has a job and together with my housing benefit money and unemployment benefit it's enough to get by. However there was a 5 year period where I was just living in a double room which you get used to but isn't ideal. My dad would say (in Scottish accent) "It's your own stupid fault kid!" (Laughs)

MW: Can you tell us any more about the Extradition system?

GM: There is a man who is British and who runs an online gambling system and the Americans have their online gambling systems and because of probably jealousy the Americans have arranged to have the British man arrested because the federal government isn't making any tax from his gambling venture. They arrested him and not the citizens for breaking American law. He stands to be extradited under the new fast track system however this is meant to be a system for dealing with terrorists.

They also have used the new law on the "NatWest Three". They have also extradited a man for some type of price fixing charges but at the time the man did this it was legal, but the extradition act is retrospective so the Americans have decided to try and arrest him for it even though it was 10 years ago and wasn't illegal at the time. They are just using the system for these means and it's being completely misused.

MW: Isn't it the case that if it wasn't illegal years ago to do a thing just because they change the law now doesn't mean you committed a crime back then? That's how I thought the law worked.

GM: Indeed. The NatWest Three case had the people involved having to pay 1 million dollars bail, I think only two of them could afford this because they were fairly well off. They are extradited to the US now. They are not allowed contact with each other unless a solicitor is present. They have these electronic monitoring tags on them. They are not allowed any UK witnesses. They are in a terrible situation.