Defense Department eyes hacker Defcon for more Gary Mckinnon's

We thought this report by IDG News was very ironic in more ways than one. The US Air Force are recruiting hackers at the same time as attempting to extradite Gary Mckinnon for acts of a similar nature. Perhaps the intelligence agencies have finally realised that a lot of these guys do want to help and that guys like Gary Mckinnon are better off being listened to rather than abused. Here is the report. The Air Force recruited 60 at last year's hacker conference; this year it's back for more. The U.S. Air Force has found an unlikely source of new recruits: The yearly Defcon hacking conference, which runs Thursday through Sunday in Las Vegas. Col. Michael Convertino came to Defcon for the first time last year, and after finding about 60 good candidates for both enlisted and civilian positions decided to come back again. "The principal reason that I'm here is to recruit," said Convertino, commander of the U.S. Air Force's 318th Information Operations Group, speaking Thursday during a panel discussion at Defcon's sister conference, Black Hat. "We have many empty jobs, empty slots that we can't fill." Federal agencies have only recently begun embracing the hacker crowd. When U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) director of futures exploration Jim Christy hosted his first Defcon "Meet the Fed" panel on 1999, he was one of two people onstage. At this week's Defcon, there may be several thousand federal employees in attendance, he said. Federal government employees first started coming to Defcon to get information and build relationships from the hacker community, Christy said during an interview, but now it is becoming more acceptable to find new recruits at the show, despite its reputation as a subversive hacking conference. "The character of Defcon has changed over the years," he said in an interview. "Ninety-five percent of the people here are good guys." And federal agencies have changed too, particularly since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said Linton Wells II, the former CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), now a research professor with the National Defense University in Washington D.C. "The federal government has engaged with a lot of people they wouldn't have even talked to before 9/11," he said. Christy expects that a couple of hundred of this year's attendees will be recruited by federal agencies, but no one is recruiting more aggressively than the Air Force. "The Air Force has always been the leader in this area," he said. Convertino's efforts reflect a government-wide effort to step up cyber-security recruiting. On Monday, the DoD co-sponsored an effort to recruit 10,000 young computer through a series of cyber-contests, known as the U.S. Cyber Challenge In an interview, Convertino said that by next year many of his recruits will have completed the hiring process and will be able to attend the conference and encourage others to enlist. The federal government has long had a hard time attracting and keeping top computer security talent, even at the very top. Although the Obama administration created a new high level cyber security advisor position earlier this year, it remains unfilled. According to a Forbes Magazine report, the job has already been turned down by several qualified candidates. Cyber-security is becoming a hot-button issue, which means more congressional interference, and for people in the field more time spent responding to political pressures instead of real security threats. The recruitment process is long and tedious -- obtaining a security clearance can take 18 months -- and the pay is generally lower than in the private sector. But the challenges are unique and at Defcon this week the DoD's chief security officer made a recruiting pitch to attendees, describing it as a place where geeks could develop world-class cyber security skills. "I have never seen in my entire career a more concerted effort.... to focus on this are area of education, training and awareness," CSO Robert Lentz told conference attendees. "Any one of you in this room who want to seek positions in the government…. the opportunities are there; the resources are there. " There might be one other reason why a government job could appeal to Defcon attendees. The feds like to talk about developing cyber-security capabilities to protect the nation's infrastructure, but they may also be spending time at Defcon looking for people who know how to attack systems as well, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with security vendor F-Secure. "If you want people who know how to attack, this is the place." The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/080109-defense-deparment-eyes-hacker-con.html

Boris Johnson in the Telegraph on Gary Mckinnon

Boris Johnson writes in the Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/5963698/Stop-passing-the-buck-on-Gary-McKinnon-and-let-British-common-sense-prevail.html Since it is now obvious that the British state is about to commit one of the most protoplasmic acts of self-abasement since Suez, and since the clock is now ticking to the moment when Gary McKinnon, 43, will be taken from his home in north London and put – if necessary by force – on a plane to America, it is time to pose the question everyone seems to have ignored. Leave aside, for a moment, the morality of exporting the Asperger’s sufferer for trial in America. Can I ask, what is the point of having a trial at all? I simply do not understand what proposition is to be so expensively tested in this American courtroom. Gary McKinnon is accused of hacking into American military computers. He is charged with roaming around the cyberspace of the Pentagon, and leaving such insulting spoor as “your security is cr-p”. He is accused of guessing passwords, and trying to view secret photos of unidentified flying objects in Nasa databanks. All this will be put to him in court by some brace-twanging prosecution counsel, as though it were the crux of the matter. And yet Mr McKinnon has never denied it. He has always said that he hacked into American military computers, and that is because he earnestly believes that there is a conspiracy between Uncle Sam and Big Oil to cover up the interception of alien craft that are running on some kind of renewable energy. For all I know he may be right. It might just be that the Vulcans have discovered some way of making cucumbers from moonbeams, and then boiling those cucumbers up into bioethanol. It may be that he is right in thinking that alien life forms did land at Roswell. It may be that the securocrats of the Pentagon have for decades been concealing the fact that Elvis is alive and well, and living on Mars. If the trial were to get to the bottom of that or any other big UFO mystery, then it might be worth the admission. But, of course, the trial turns on no such question. The only point to be proven is whether or not Gary McKinnon did the hacking, and on that there is no doubt. He says he did. He says it freely. So the only questions remaining are: whether his actions constitute a crime that deserves the seven-year torture of the extradition process, whether he deserves the possibility of a 60-year jail sentence, and whether the British authorities are right to be engaged in this dog-like grovelling to America. To all those questions the answer must be an emphatic no. I do not believe for a moment that the Pentagon and Nasa sustained half a million pounds’ worth of damage to their systems, as they bleatingly allege. But even if it were true, Gary McKinnon has performed a service that must be rated cheap at the price. He may be a crank, but then he is certainly no terrorist. He may believe in little green men, but he was not operating as a fifth columnist on behalf of these Venusians. He was not trying to cripple American defences in preparation for an assault from outer space. He was simply following up a weird intuition that UFOs exist, with all the compulsiveness that he has exhibited since he was a child. In so doing, he has generously helped America to prepare against attack from a more sinister foe. If it was so ludicrously easy to penetrate these encryptions, then what could al-Qaeda have done? Just imagine if America’s defence establishment had commissioned IT consultants to probe their systems as exhaustively as Gary McKinnon. The contract would have been worth far more than £500,000. McKinnon did it without charge, sitting up all the night, hardly eating, smoking heavily and spending so long tap-tapping in his dressing gown that his girlfriend gave up on him. The Americans shouldn’t be threatening him with jail. They should be offering him consultancy. Even if you still believe – and I don’t – that there was some element of malice in his actions, that does not make him a fit person to be sent for trial and incarceration in America. The diagnosis of Asperger’s has been confirmed by the world’s leading expert in the field, Simon Baron-Cohen. He says that if this dreamer were to find himself in prison, there is a risk that he would take his own life. This 2003 extradition treaty – supposedly aimed at al-Qaeda – has caught the wrong man in its gin. My objection is not that the treaty is lopsided, though of course it is. The crucial point is that Gary McKinnon is not some smooth-talking banker accused of fraud, nor is he a terrorist. He is a classic British nutjob, who passionately believes something that is irrational but cannot be easily controverted, and he is a prime candidate for the protection of the Government. In a tortuous apologia for his decision to extradite, the Home Secretary yesterday wrote – as if it were a good thing – that “one of the most important features of the 2003 Act was the deliberate removal of any discretion the Home Secretary may have in relation to extradition”. On this account, we may wonder why we have elected politicians at all. On this account, the treaty is like a kind of computer-assisted catapult that pings people across the Atlantic whenever the Americans require. In reality, the Home Office has no such excuse. It could easily have decided, on humanitarian grounds, that the extradition should not go ahead. The High Court has merely confirmed that its decision to ignore common sense and decency was not, in itself, illegal. It was just immoral. I can identify at least one mysterious flying object over the skies of London, and that is the buck being passed, at high speed, by the Home Secretary. Not since the waters retired from the face of the earth has there been such a display of blob-like invertebracy in Whitehall. Let us hope that a British court will have the courage in the next few days to stop this madness, shame the Government, and prevent the martyrdom of a harmless eccentric.