Australian Extradited For Breaking US Law At Home

An anonymous reader sends us a link to a report in The Age about an Australian resident, who had never set foot in the US and broke US intellectual-property laws in Australia, being extradited to the US to face trial. Hew Raymond Griffiths pleaded guilty in Virginia to overseeing all aspects of the operation of the group Drink Or Die, which cracked copy-protected software and media products and distributed them for free. He faces up to 10 years in a US jail and half a million dollars in fines.

Comments

Vice versa

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone point out a few cases where the news was somewhere along the lines of "American Extradited For Breaking [fill in foreign country] Law At Home" or does this business only work one way?

Absolutely Disgusting

[alexibu]

The Aus government is working it's way to being a U.S. state.
We are making our military hardware compatible with theirs, we are fighting in stupid profit based wars that go against the international community with them.
They don't hand over their war criminals for international trial, and now they expect everyone around the world to respect their laws.
Americas international standing is reducing every day. And judging by the media driven fear of the outside they are cultivating and the laughable democratic system and a retard for a president, they are well on the way to being the worst totalitarian state out there.
We have the names of U.S states and capitals rammed down our necks by countless TV shows and movies and they don't even know we have states.

I hope Iran/China/N. Korea gets some US citizens extradited too as part of this new high in international cooperation.

EU Expedited Extradition

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly, you signed up to the EU Extradited extradition which permits extradition for crimes including computer crimes (e.g. breaking DRM, no kidding). However that only applies to within the EU. But if the US can get a puppet government (e.g. Blairville) to issue a warrant for anyone in Europe, they can then extradite using the UK to US expedited extradition treaty.

There's no limits on re-extradition.

Worse, there is no judicial check in the UK, that the reasons given for the extradition, really complies with the requirements for extraditing. This is why a McKinnon (who broke US PCs into had a look around and left) is being accused of doing $5000 damage to each PC, in order for it to be a Federal crime and hence extraditable. The extradition mechanism doesn't let a UK judge check it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/25/extraditio n_hacker/

In theory they could make any allegation against any UK citizen and get them extradited (kidnapped in effect) and the court could do nothing.

[rant]F***ing Blair. We elected a leader, and he became a Bush follower and sold us out. I'll piss on his grave when he dies for the damage he's done to the UK sovereignty. [/rant]

Re:Huh?

[dajak]

It would be like the US trying to extradite someone from Amsterdam for smoking pot.

The Netherlands does actually get dozens of US extradition requests a year for drugs related crimes, and regularly does extradite Dutch citizens for engaging in drugs transactions with Americans and in some cases even with DEA agents operating on Dutch soil. It's a major political issue here, but the major (conservative) government coalition parties apparently basically tolerate this kind of activity because it creates a possibility to use forms of entrapment that would otherwise be illegal here, and it is easier to get people in jail in the US, particularly through plea bargaining, which is also illegal here. Just smoking pot is safe, though.

Re:He most certainly IS under US jurisdiction

[Gorshkov]

Welcome to the new world order, Bush (Sr., Jr.) and Clinton style.

This has nothing to do with Clinton or either of the Bushes. The USA has been trying to assert it's laws over other countries for a very, very long time. Take any number of attempts by the USA to tell Canadian companies that they can't have business dealings with Cuba, just because they happen to be owned by American companies. Other examples would be the (attempted) enforcement of American policies regarding exportation of goods to certain countries, etc.

This "New World Order" goes back at LEAST 60 years .... and without having done any research on the topic, I'm willing to bet I could find examples going much farther back.

I will say, however, that this is the first time I've heard of anything involving extradition for violating US law when the person involved has never set foot in the US, and the crimes never took place on US soil.

Re:He most certainly IS under US jurisdiction

[AaronW]

You do realize that many people who were snatched and held at Gitmo were found to be completely innocent and were snatched by "not nice" people because Pakistan and other places were paid for each suspect they rounded up. There are many people who have been proven to be innocent there that still cannot return home to their friends and families because their home country refuses to let them back in.

What happens to the innocent people there who eventually go home? There are many held at Gitmo who have already proven to be innocent who are stuck there because their home countries won't allow them back.

No matter how bad these people are, we should not stoop to their level and must respect human rights, otherwise we are little better than they are. This country was founded on certain principals, and if we throw them out because of terrorists, then the terrorists have won.

I agree we should throw the book at those responsible for terrorism, but I also believe in habeus corpus. If they're guilty, lock them up forever or in some cases death, but make sure they're guilty first. Our current behavior has robbed the US of the moral high ground in the eyes of many outside this country.

After all, would you fully trust the word of Pakistan about who is innocent and who is guilty? After all, they were one of the Taliban's biggest supporters up until 9/11 and still support them through numerous warlords.

As for blaming Carter, you also should blame Ronald Reagan for quietly cowing to the terrorists in Lebanon and illegally supplying weapons to Iran or supporting WMDs in Iraq and Saddam. Carter was a wimp and screwed up, but so did Ronald Reagan. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Interventions _of_the_Reagan_AdministrationWikipedia.