NASA Hacker Wins Right to Extradition Hearing

E5Rebel writes "Gary McKinnon, the UK-based ex-systems administrator accused of conducting the biggest military hack of all time, has won the right to have his case against extradition to the U.S. heard by the House of Lords."

Comments

Plea bargain

[l33t.g33k]

From TFA:

They accused US investigators of trying to coerce McKinnon into accepting a secret plea bargain by threatening him with a long prison sentence if he did not collaborate.

Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.

Re:Plea bargain

[QuantumG]

I once had a police offer tell me that, in the UK and Australia, such things are illegal. This is actually just holding the police to the same standard as the rest of society. In the US there's laws against "making deals" but they don't apply to the police (or the government's prosecutors). For example:

519.030 Compounding a crime.
(1) A person is guilty of compounding a crime when:
(a) He solicits, accepts or agrees to accept any benefit upon an agreement or
understanding that he will refrain from initiating a prosecution for a crime; or
(b) He confers, offers, or agrees to confer any benefit upon another person upon
agreement or understanding that such other person will refrain from initiating
a prosecution for a crime.
(2) In any prosecution under this section, it is a defense that the benefit did not exceed
an amount which the defendant reasonably believed to be due as restitution or
indemnification for harm caused by the offense.
(3) Compounding a crime is a Class A misdemeanor. So yeah, if I shoot you and say "I'll give you $10k to keep quiet" then I'm compounding a crime. If you accept then we're both compounding a crime.

Most the time the deals made in the US are of the "plead guilty" variety, not the "talk and we won't prosecute" variety, so this particular law wouldn't apply, but you get the idea.

The Law Lords

[flyingfsck]

is not the same thing as the House of Lords. The Law Lords is the highest court in the British Commonwealth.

Re:Tit for tat

[kegon]

So basically he's being punished because he embarrased a US institution that should know better about computer security. You have got to be joking! He has only embarrassed himself, and now the joke is on him. Read this interview:

• He scanned 65,000 machines in about "8 minutes" by "tying together other people's machines" using a 56k dial up connection
• During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
• His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
• He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across."

C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like.

See, some crazy Russian murdered another Russian spy in London with some nasty radioactive poison. Pretty serious right? Yep, a hell of a lot more serious than some gangster boss living in the UK is when a foreign government sanctions the use of radioactive materials on foreign soil. This is no mere assassination. What if the UK dropped a dirty bomb to the home address of the prime suspect in Russia ? That would be an act of war, wouldn't it ?