Quote:"remote control of their desktop" vnc, pc-anywhere or cotdc-msbo running on military systems. hmmm. unlikely. Remote x-windows session, maybe. Although remote desktopping appears to have been used to control some US nuclear power stations (not by hackers, but by the downsized safety teams, not enough engineers to go round for some reason, namely enron), one of which reportedly caught a virus (or was deliberately infected) shutting down access to some safety systems for a good few hours, so something this stupid is sort of possible. However, changing the desktop bit depth is not going to do a damn thing to the actual picture file being viewed, and therefore the speed of download should not change.

Also if he was downloading "huge, high-resolution images" over a 56k connection, say A4 300dpi, no lossyness to avoid compression artifacts, ummm, well it would certainly a while with the 1 to 10k actual speeds you get from dialup + transatlantic. Or perhaps I had a really rubbish isp last time I used a modem.

"There were no visible seams or riveting" - on a satellite image in 4 bit colour - well I'm really not surprised what with all the dithering, no visible edges either I'd guess, or detail.

"It was a silvery, cigar-shaped object with geodesic spheres on either side." - large metal phallus anyone?

"The object didn't look manmade or anything like what we have created." - other than like cigar tubes and geodesic domes. which are manmade. umm... what?

"Because I was using a Java application, I could only get a screenshot of the picture -- it did not go into my temporary internet files." - hello? he can't be doing this in Internet Explorer, surely?

"At my crowning moment, someone at NASA discovered what I was doing and I w" - oke from a lovely dream.

This guy should not be extradited to anywhere, it would be a vast waste of public money. Unless the point of these interviews is to make himself appear to be a moron in order to somehow help his defence, all he has done is run some scripts written by other people and then caused some havok by blundering blindly round filesystems in shell languages he can barely read. And then made up the conspiracy UFO stuff to impress his friends, long before being fingered by the police. Now all he has left in terms of respect is his probably very impressed local clique who might turn their backs on him if they found out how little he told them is true, so people being people he will probably stick to his story, even if it makes little or no sense.

If someone like this can actually get illicit access to NASA and other US government systems, then imho the government deserves everything they get and should spend their money sorting out their security rather than persecuting the clearly insane. McKinnon deserves nothing more than a cursory slap on the wrist, plus a mental health councillor and possibly a nice cup of sweet tea.