Saving Gary McKinnon (5 page)

It seemed ironic that I was brought up with virtually no technology and now my only child was facing the threat of extradition for a crime that would have been science fiction when I was born. There was no TV in Scotland, wireless was a radio and the internet hadn’t been dreamed of. The web was something a spider made and hacking happened to trees.

How could Gary ever have realised that tapping on a keyboard and leaving a few virtual notes – including telling the Pentagon
that their security was crap – could lead to this? Totally disproportionate sentences which would be regarded as ludicrous in the UK are all too often given in America, with no apparent sense of perspective. We were scared.

Gary and Tamsin’s relationship, which was already suffering, wasn’t helped when, after Gary’s arrest, a journalist had gone through every number in Tamsin’s aunt’s phone and rung them all – her friends, her employers and even people she barely knew – to try to get information on Gary. This was hugely upsetting and embarrassing for Tamsin’s aunt and could have cost her her job but instead cost the journalist his.

2002 was the year of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee and there seemed to be almost as many headlines about Gary as there were about the Jubilee. I had no idea then how much the media coverage was going to help us in our fight to save him. People tend to forget the good that the media often does in exposing corruption and crime and in fighting for justice and fairness. There are some damn good journalists out there.

However, the downside of the media attention was that because of the publicity, despite his best efforts Gary could no longer get any job in computers, but managed to get a job as a trainee forklift truck driver which he then lost because his employer was being bombarded constantly by phone calls from the press trying to find out information on Gary. ‘The biggest military hack of all time,’ they said, quoting the US prosecutors.

How could it be ‘the biggest hack of all time’ when Gary had a basic home computer on a 28K dial-up connection and had had no need to hack as there were apparently no passwords or firewalls on the machines he was alleged to have accessed? As computer expert Oxblood Ruffin said: You hack into a jungle, you don’t hack onto a bowling green.

Gary had left cyber-notes informing the Pentagon that their
security was crap and that he’d keep disrupting ‘by leaving cyber-notes’ until someone at the top paid attention and sorted it out.

Gary is a pacifist and genuinely believed that US security had been infiltrated by aliens. He stupidly left a cyber-note accusing the US of state-sponsored terrorism – in essence a cyber-peace protest that if scrawled on a wall few would have noticed. He also left a cyber-note that tied into some of the conspiracy theories that were prevalent on the internet at the time.

It didn’t help that some of this happened after 9/11 when paranoia reigned and the news was obsessed with ‘terror, terror, terror’, which for some reason always reminded me of Violet, the little girl with the red hair in the TV series
Just William
when she threatened, ‘I’ll scream and I’ll scream and I’ll scream until I make myself sick.’

I still couldn’t believe that Gary had managed to access NASA and Pentagon computers from his home computer. Although when one of the US prosecutors said in an interview that the computers Gary accessed were ‘protected’ by easy-to-guess passwords (including the word ‘password’) it became easier to understand.

It was heartbreaking that someone as nice as Gary, the boy who was fascinated by UFOs and aliens and who used to be afraid to travel on a bus, was now being destroyed by prosecutors treating naive computer pioneers as some kind of 21st-century witches.

In 2002 prima facie evidence that could be contested in a British court of damage amounting to $5,000 on each machine was required in order to make the crime of computer misuse an extraditable offence. The US alleged exactly this amount of financial damage in Gary’s case but no evidence of the alleged damage was ever produced and no prima facie evidence was ever
submitted to the CPS. We believe this is why the US did not officially request extradition from the UK for Gary until late 2004, as by then the 2003 extradition treaty had begun to be used and under this new treaty with America no evidence is required in order for the US to extradite anyone from the UK.

Gary was being threatened with being dragged from his home, his family and everyone and everything he ever knew, to be taken in chains to a foreign land. The terrifying prospect of a sixty-year sentence made it likely that he would die there and never set foot on British soil again.

One weekend when his dad Charlie was visiting us, I mentioned that Gary was young for his age in many ways and he said, ‘I’m not, am I, Dad?’

‘I’m afraid you are, son,’ said his dad.

It seemed so unbelievably wrong that this unique and gentle man, our son, should find himself in a position worse than that of most murderers, rapists and war criminals. Gary had never hurt anyone. Could someone please tell me how this could be happening?

Gary never leaves the UK, rarely leaves north London and never goes on holiday, yet they wanted to drag him to a foreign land and incarcerate him in some godforsaken prison for sixty years. Well, he couldn’t go, he just couldn’t. Anyone thinking a computer geek should serve sixty years in a US prison, or in any prison for that matter, had to be crazy.

After the US indictment in 2002 and their announcement of their intention to extradite, the fear was consuming me. I’d wake up in the night sweating and in a state of terror, thinking that they might be going to take Gary at any second. I felt that we were the ones being terrorised by the government and not the other way round.

How could the CPS, who had intended to prosecute Gary,
suddenly tell us months later that they were not going to prosecute him after all, as they had been ‘ordered’ from the very top to stand aside to let America deal with him? Who ordered them? And this was despite the CPS having put in writing their dissatisfaction with the lack of any evidence from the US other than what they described as hearsay that would not be admissible as evidence in a UK court.

How could the CPS be allowed to cherry-pick like that? The same CPS prosecutor had just allowed Aaron Caffrey to be tried in Southwark Crown Court, where he was acquitted. Yet Aaron was accused of attacking and bringing Port Houston to a halt immediately after 9/11. Why wasn’t Gary being tried in the UK like Aaron Caffrey and Mathew Bevan and every other alleged UK computer hacker before him?

That so many NASA and Pentagon computers did not have basic security installed that would immediately have flagged Gary’s presence was shocking to everyone. Gary had embarrassed the US and for that he was to pay a high price.

David Burrowes, Gary’s MP, found out at a later date that the cyber-notes Gary had left were one of the major reasons why America was relentless in its pursuit. They were angry because in the American ambassador’s words, ‘He mocked us.’

We felt that if we kept quiet and if Gary kept a low profile and avoided making their lack of security public, America might drop the extradition warrant and let it go.

It was Christmas 2002 and we were going to make this the very best of Christmases as our five little ones were looking forward to it so much and we knew that Gary would love to see their faces when they opened their presents. The children all helped to decorate the Christmas tree and Mae made a Christmas angel to put on the very top of it. We took them to visit Santa in Crews Hill in Enfield and real deer were there for
the children to interact with. Christmas Day was magical and my Christmas wish was for Gary to stay here where he belonged and for the children to have a happy future ahead of them.

More than a year had now passed since Gary’s arrest in March 2002 and on 5 April 2003 Karen Todner and Tracey Newport from Kaim Todner Solicitors and Gary’s QC, Edmund Lawson, met with the legal attaché to the US embassy in London to discuss a document containing a proposed plea bargain. They were taken on a tour of the US embassy in Grosvenor Square. The building has nine storeys, three of which are below ground, and Karen said it had shops and cafés and was like walking around a city. However, no matter how impressive it was, Karen did not for one second lose sight of why she was there.

Although Karen had not told us about the ‘fry’ threat at this point as the discussion with the US was confidential, the fact that the plea bargain could not be guaranteed and that the proposed sentence was X number of years ‘per count’ was terrifying enough.

I started having nightmares about running through fields with Gary to try to reach a place of safety. In one of the dreams Gary was little and I was holding him under my arm as I was running through the streets trying to find a place to hide. People were offering to hide us but the security cameras had seen us going in so we had to leave again and keep running. I would wake up exhausted and unable to shake the feeling of absolute fear.

As time went on, we started to carry on with our lives as normally as possible under the circumstances. Gary was confident that the US would be unable to show evidence of any damage as he hadn’t caused any and we thought that as so much time had passed, they must be going to drop the case against him.

We still had Mae, Jay, Willie, Michael and Charlotte with us and they needed all our day-to-day attention. Being so unbelievably busy looking after the children was a partial escape from dwelling on what we had no control over with regard to Gary’s fate, inextricably linked to our own. But although the children filled my heart they didn’t halt the fear that hovered there.

Breakfast time, bath time, bed time and all the happy chaos in between occupied us. The children loved nothing more than to curl up in bed while I read them a story: the same story night after night after night, as that was what they wanted to hear.

I invented cartoon characters, paving stones from famous London squares and weaved them into a story about a naive young paving stone named Lester Square exploring London with his friend Trafalga when they were out of their squares together. All of the children we fostered loved the stories and enjoyed singing and dancing, so I wrote and recorded the ‘Lester Square’ song, which they adored dancing and jumping around to.

Being an artist, Wilson couldn’t resist drawing Lester and Trafalga and their friends from other London squares, bringing the characters even more to life for the children. Because they loved them so much we later decided to publish our first book:
Lester Square.
We were over the moon when Foyles bookshop sent us a letter congratulating us on how many copies we had sold through their shops.

Two companies rang us to say they were interested in making an animation of Lester. We were excited, but until we knew that Gary was going to be OK, we couldn’t concentrate on any of our own plans.

The children were very settled with us. We did everything together and Mae and Jay got excellent reports from school. They were popular with their teachers and the other pupils and were constantly being invited to parties. We were very much a family.

The social workers came to visit one day to tell us that now the children were doing so well, their behavioural problems resolved, they were looking for people to adopt them and were intending to advertise them in the
Be My Parent
magazine. Although I
always knew this time would come, I had put such thoughts to the back of my mind. Logically I knew that the children would be going to people who were younger than us, probably people who couldn’t have children, but the thought of it cut my heart like a knife.

Taking photos of the children for the magazine was one of the hardest things. The children had no idea what the photos were for and we felt as though we were betraying them, as they sat together on the floor, smiling and looking up at us with trusting eyes.

We wondered if we’d be allowed to adopt the children, but because of the uncertainty of Gary’s situation, I doubted it would be feasible.

It was a hot summer’s day and we took the children to Paradise Wildlife Park, an adventure-park-cum-wildlife-centre. The children dashed straight into the large paddling pool. Willie was singing as they were splashing around and that made us laugh, but it was a bittersweet moment as I could no longer imagine life without them.

We decided to go on the helter-skelter and the older children got themselves into sacks and whizzed down. Charlotte wanted to go on it too, so I took her up and we both went inside the sack and I had my arms tightly around her to keep her safe. As we started going down, my right arm was pressed hard against the side and suddenly I was in agony as it was tightly dragged all the way down until we reached the bottom. Every second of the friction burning and tearing caused excruciating pain. I desperately wanted to tuck my arm into the sack but I couldn’t move it for risk of letting Charlotte go for even a second – I instinctively protected her, no matter what.