The guy who committed the biggest hack of the US military is still free

In 2001, Gary McKinnon wreaked havoc on the computer systems at the Department of Defense. DoD estimates McKinnon's hacks of Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and other DoD computer systems caused more than $800,000 in damages between February 2001 and March 2002.

He was looking for evidence of UFOs. He says it's all there.

"It was above the Earth's hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up. This thing was hanging in space, the earth's hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing."

He claimed he found evidence of NASA altering photos to remove strange shapes from the sky, a list of non-terrestrial officers, logs of ships named USSS LeMay and USSS Hillenkoetter, all with a dial-up 56k connection.

"I can't remember," McKinnon told the Guardian in 2005. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

He also claimed he found evidence of free energy production, called "Zero-Point" Energy, being suppressed by the U.S. government.

"I knew that governments suppressed antigravity, UFO-related technologies, free energy or what they call zero-point energy. This should not be kept hidden from the public when pensioners can't pay their fuel bills."

In October of 2012, British Home Secretary Theresa May withdrew the extradition order to have McKinnon sent to the United States to face trial. Her concern is McKinnon's Asperger's Syndrome would lead him to commit suicide if he were sent to the U.S., where he faced 70 years in prison and $2 million in fines. The UK opted not to prosecute him due to the complications which would arise from trying him in the UK for a crime where the evidence is across the Atlantic Ocean.

"Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat – Network Status – and it lists all the connections to that machine," he said. "There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand… every night for the entire five to seven years I was doing this."

McKinnon's hacking is widely known as the "biggest of all time."

These days, McKinnon is still a free man who started Small SEO, a site which charges £40 an hour to help businesses get prominently mentioned in search engine results. To this day, he cannot travel outside of the United Kingdom but has no restrictions on his ability to use computers.

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