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.

Re:Plea bargain

[the_womble]

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.

Except that the rest of the world regards it as a loathsome practice designed to get someone in jail for something, even when there is a lack of conclusive evidence against them. It is getting criminal convictions through coercion rather than evidence.

Re:aliens are for real

[Spy der Mann]

Your comment just reminded me of a comic strip.

Secretary (undercover alien working for the CIA): Would either of you care for more coffee?
Agent Wolf: You didn't fertilize it with alien mind control spores, did you?
Secretary: For the last time, agent Wolf, I AM NOT AN ALIEN.
Agent Wolf: YOU HAVE A TAIL!!!
Their boss: Agent Wolf, that's enough! Or do you want to be sent to sensitivity training again?
Agent Wolf: No, sir.

question....

[lordvalrole]

How do they figure £475,000 worth of damage? I don't know much about the case (or really anything of it) but did he actually do harmful damage to the crap he hacked into...or is it potential damage? I can never trust half the money numbers people throw around these days.

Re:question....

[ScentCone]

But - if those systems were your responsibility - what would it take you to satisfy the people you report to that there was no damage? How many hours of review, extra archiving, and other admin chores would you face in the wake of known break in? Do you just take the cracker's word for it that he didn't alter anything, or do you have to spend lots of time checking that out, and probably get some third parties involved in auditing that look-see, just to be sure? None of that is free, and most of it's very expensive.

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:The Law Lords

[Marty200]

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

So where do the time lords fit into that hierarchy?

Re:The Law Lords

[nacturation]

So where do the time lords fit into that hierarchy? Go down the hall and it's the fourth dimension on the right.

Re:Tit for tat

[Short Circuit]

* 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. The first item sounds like a botnet. I've (legally) done the second item, over VNC. The third item sounds plausible if he turns the VNC bit depth way, way down. And, yes, the outcome would behave very much like a slide projector on a dial-up connection.

As for the fourth item, I don't know why he didn't think to take a screenshot of his VNC window; That would have given him something to save. And I don't know what he was referring to by some guy's hand moving.

All in all, it sounds like he used a botnet to find a PC running unprotected VNC, and connected to it with compression turned way up, and color depth turned way down. At some point, some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausible.