Between early 2001 and early 2002, a Scottish systems administrator working from his girlfriend’s aunt’s house in London wandered through nearly a hundred U.S. military and NASA computers. Gary McKinnon, born in Glasgow in 1966 and using the alias Solo, was not after money or secrets to sell. Inspired by the Disclosure Project, he wanted proof of suppressed free energy, anti-gravity technology, and alien spacecraft. American authorities called it the largest military computer intrusion in history and said it cost over 700,000 dollars to repair.

This episode covers how he got in, what he claimed to find, and the ten-year extradition fight that followed. A Virginia grand jury indicted him on seven counts carrying up to 70 years. Britain’s Extradition Act of 2003 let the United States request him without presenting contestable evidence, and the House of Lords let the case proceed. Then a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome and severe depression turned a hacker into a cause, and in late 2012 the Home Secretary blocked his extradition.

• McKinnon used simple scripts to scan military networks for administrator accounts that had been left with no password at all.
• U.S. officials said he knocked 2,000 computers in the Washington area offline for 24 hours and wiped weapons logs at a naval weapons station.
• He claimed he saw a raw NASA image of a cigar-shaped craft, but his dial-up connection dropped before he could save it.
• Prosecutors offered three to four years if he surrendered and pleaded guilty, a tactic his lawyers called an abuse of process.
• Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour recorded a charity track for the campaign, and his mother Janis Sharp ran for parliament to keep the case in the news.