NULL HORIZON

From a flat in Crouch End, Gary McKinnon reached 97 US military and NASA computers — not by breaking in, but by walking through open doors marked No Entry that someone had left unlocked. He took nothing and broke nothing; on the way out he even left a polite sticky note on the door reminding them to lock it. He did what any capable and curious person would do. He was looking for evidence of UFOs. What he found was a spreadsheet — column headers, branch codes, hull designators, transfer durations — and one integer: 4680. Thirteen years. Fleet to fleet. The official story played straight, the one row he copied that was never shown in court, and the world on the other side of an empty password field.

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