Gary McKinnon

Scottish systems administrator who between 2001-2002 hacked into 97 US military and NASA computers from his girlfriend's aunt's house in London using a dial-up connection. He claims he found evidence of a secret 'Solar Warden' space fleet — a spreadsheet listing non-terrestrial officers, ship-to-ship transfers, and fleet-to-fleet transfers between named vessels. He also found a high-resolution image of a cigar-shaped object in NASA's Johnson Space Center systems that was being airbrushed out before public release. McKinnon said the image was smooth, no rivets, no seams — clearly not human-made. The US government charged him with causing $700,000 in damages and sought extradition, facing up to 70 years in prison. The extradition battle lasted 10 years and became a major UK-US diplomatic issue. In 2012, UK Home Secretary Theresa May blocked the extradition on human rights grounds, citing McKinnon's Asperger syndrome and suicide risk. He was never tried. The US government's extreme pursuit of McKinnon — seeking 70 years for what he described as finding unprotected systems with blank or default passwords — raises the question: was the punishment proportional to the crime, or proportional to what he found? If the files were nonsense, why fight for a decade to prosecute him?