He's a stupid git. And @Blinkstr
If I was him, when I 'discovered' a way into a supposedly secure govenment server or servers, regardless of which county it belonged to. I'd do one of two things:
Bottle it and hope they never noticed me. 99.7% probability.
Try to sell or give it away to my countries espionage agencies. 0.3 probability.
I would not decide to try and hunt for proof of aliens. I'd be very much aware that I'm doing stuff that will land me in very hot water if I'm found out.
Nor would I try and be nice and contact the government and inform them of the breach I found. That just opens up a can of worms. Even if your viewing a website and then change the url a bit to find other stuff, that can be considered hacking.
Poster Blinkstr, although I'm not from the U.S.A., I totally agree with you, if the US was populated with nothing more than red neck xenophobic freaks then industrial innovation would be a little hard to come by. The last time I looked, Intel and AMD are US companies. Since I own a PC that relies on an Intel processor and an AMD/ATI graphics card, I think it's safe to assume that intelligent and creative people can be US citizens too. Perhaps in McKinnon's case, the judge will see that, although he was "very naughty" (must be read in a Futurama Santa style), there are/were gaping holes in secure servers that should not have been there in the first place.
What I find most offensive though is that the UK can't deport (yes I know it's not the same as extradite) a tosser like Abu Qatada (Interestingly, a long pause while looking up his name, I'll have to go for a new tin foil hat fitting), because his "human rights" may be threatened. Jordan, (where the arsehole belongs) MAY torture or kill him.
I leave you, dear readers to decide on what the bigger injustice is.