Gary McKinnon, a 42-year old Englishman, is accused of hacking into 97 US military computers (53 US Army, 26 US Navy, 16 NASA, one US Department of Defence computer and one from the US Air Force), as well as rendering 300 computers at a US Navy weapons station unusable after the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001. US authorities allege that he caused damage in the order of US$800,000 (£550.000). He was caught when trying to download a photograph that he believed was an alien spacecraft from a NASA computer at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas using his own email address. His extradition is being sought from the UK for what one US prosecutor has described as “the biggest military computer hack of all time”. He has signed a confession admitting that his hacking constituted an offence under the UK’s Computer Misuse Act 1990 in a bid to avoid extradition to the USA, hoping that the case will be heard under UK jurisdiction, where the possible sentences for such an offence are lighter. On 23 January 2009, he won permission from the High Court in London to apply for a judicial review against his extradition to the United States.
