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Australian Extradited For Breaking US Law At Home

Posted by kdawson on from the no-safe-haven dept.

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.

3 of 777 comments (clear)

  1. Vice versa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  2. EU Expedited Extradition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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]

  3. Re:He most certainly IS under US jurisdiction by Gorshkov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.