The Computer Age

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Gary McKinnon, a 42-year-old unemployed computer programmer from England, just ran out of time. His final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights was denied and he’ll be extradited to the U.S. to face federal charges for allegedly hacking into over 90 Pentagon and NASA computers, and, on one occasion, deleting computer files that temporarily paralyzed a U.S. naval weapons station in Sandy Hook Bay, New Jersey. He’s also charged with committing $370,000 worth of damage to the aforementioned computers. If convicted, McKinnon faces up to 70-years behind bars.

When news of his legal predicament first reached the British public, an outcry ensued that lead 20 members of the British Parliament to sign a motion demanding that, if convicted, McKinnon serve his prison sentence in the U.K. David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and U2 (and therefore Bono) are said to be planning a benefit concert on McKinnon’s behalf.

Back in 2002, British authorities followed the hacker’s two-year cyber trail, eventually arresting him. Was he a cyber terrorist intent on damaging U.S. national security? Was he somehow in league with Islamic radicals?

“I was in search of suppressed technology…referred to as UFO technology. I think it’s the biggest kept secret in the world,” said McKinnon in a taped interview.

“We’ve got countries being invaded to get oil contracts to the West. Meanwhile, secret parts of the government are sitting on this suppressed technology for free energy. Although it’s part of a secret government project, there must be military ties,” said McKinnon, explaining the motive behind his cyber-incursions.

Extraterrestrials became an obsession for McKinnon after he visited “The Disclosure Project” website, a UFO conspiracy group. The organization describes itself as a “non-profit research effort that has, since 1993, been identifying top-secret military, government and other witnesses to UFO and extraterrestrial events.”

According to the UFO organization’s website:

…Advanced technologies which have been identified from the study of …[extraterrestrial] vehicles, once disclosed, will replace currently used forms of energy generation and propulsion. These technologies will enable the Earth to attain a sustainable civilization without pollution, energy shortages, or global warming. These technologies are already fully operational. They have been developed within super-secret, unacknowledged special access projects. In short, the definitive solution to the world's energy, pollution, and poverty problems exists…

Who cares about the war on terror or economic upheaval when little green men have the technology to save us from the cares and struggles of our time? Now that George Bush is back in Texas, why is President Obama not releasing this epoch-changing technology as part of his stimulus package? Is he, after all, just part of the grand, government cover-up? Or is he one of “them?”

In 1965, the first Curriculum Committee on Computer Science of the Association for Computing Machinery released a report that read:

The computer scientist is interested in discovering the pragmatic means by which information can be transformed to model and analyze the information transformations in the real world.

Unfortunately, that sterile, conventional thinking went the way of slide rules, horn-rimmed glasses and pocket protectors. It is becoming clear to the McKinnon’s of the world that technology, advanced though it may be, has its limitations. These limits create a deep spiritual longing for a hi-tech messiah to save them from the discomforts of this life.

During the cold war, the Pentagon was a primary source of scorn for the political Left for wasting, as they believed, billons of dollars on needless weapons systems or just plain “war mongering.” Now they are also responsible for denying a needy mankind the materialistic comforts provided by E.T.

With billions of dollars spent on education, and with much more expected to come down the Obama pipeline, the academy continues to pump-out talented, technologically savvy individuals like Gary McKinnon. This proves that an educated and technologically smart man is not necessarily a wise man.

--Mr. Curmudgeon