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UK Hacker Loses Extradition Appeal
the4thdimension writes "A UK man, accused of breaking into US Pentagon and NASA computers in March 2001, lost an extradition appeal that would have freed him, or at least had him tried in the UK. While the US accuses him of causing over $900,000 in computer damage, his attorney asserts that, if extradited to the US, he faces harsh penalties that are "intolerable" and '...the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the U.S. government to make an example of him.' He intends to appeal to the European courts."
The linked story doesn't mention it, but he says he was told by US government officials that if he didn't plead guilty and agree to be extradited, he could be facing sixty years in prison.
Doesn't the UK refuse to extradite suspects who would face the death penalty in the US? (Also, usually our most high profile cases)
The numbers may not add up, but if our government can do as it pleases based on popular opinion, any refusal to hand over death row candidates becomes high profile and public opinion turns against the Commie Europeans. Having to dumb down charges just to get the suspects (i.e. take the death penalty off the table) presses some hot buttons. Worse it creates an environment where the rich can escape the same punishment that the poor would receive. That's politics.
On the other hand if the UK government blocks extradition of an espionage suspect...we'd probably do the same. That hits government paranoids a lot closer to home, so it's in no one's interests to block it.
more people voted conservative than Labour at the last general election. However thanks to the boundries of each region being adjusted to favour Labour (by Labour) and our first past the post system Labour stayed in power with a majority.
It says something about how shit our country has become that more liberal young people want to vote for the 'right leaning' party. That said they're also voting Lib Dems but no one ever expects them to get into power (although I'd be happy with a freakish conservative/lib dem government).
IIRC the $900,000 wasnt due to actual damage he caused, it was the cost of "securing" these systems after they realised anyone with half a clue and an internet connection could compromise their machines. How they figure that is his fault rather than actually part of the cost of their network I'm not sure.
more people voted conservative than Labour at the last general election
The facts would indicate otherwise (from here):
Labour 9,562,122
Conservative 8,772,598
"huh? how is honoring extradition treaties acting as a 'lap dog'?"
I wish people would sometimes read other comments before replying.
The reason for Britain being named a 'lap dog' is that the extradition treaty is one-sided. The US does not have to show probable cause to get Britain to extradite people to the US, but Britain has to for it to happen the other way around.
I were stood on the Mexico side of the border and you on the US side and I shot you, I would have committed my crime in Mexico, no? Same thing, greater distance involved.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
There's a rather good interview with Gary McKinnon on the Guardian's web site from earlier this month.
Provides quite an insight into what he did, why he says he did it and his mental state.
Wonder if he was a /. poster. Wouldn't surprise me.
simon
Didn't he just use Microsoft's Remote Desktop to "hack into" those systems?
Yes. He in fact exploited weak passwords - most commonly "administrator" and a blank password or a password of "password".
More curiously he ran a netstat on the boxes he compromised and viewed connections from other crackers whose IPs addresses put them all over the middle east and China.
This according to the BBC interview we previously discussed.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
compared to the sentences handed down by British courts, you are.
Nobody gets 97 years in the UK. Beside the obvious point that a person would die in jail before reaching 97 years, the number of people in the UK on a prison sentence designed to ensure that they spent the rest of their natural life in jail is (iirc) about 35. You have to have done something unbelievably sick to warrant such a sentence (see here). Where there's talk of treating him as a terrorist if he doesn't plead guilty (wtf?) and giving him a sentence stratospherically higher than he'd ever be likely to get in a British court sounds 'intolerable' to me.
IIRC, most of the 'secure' systems he accessed were FTP servers set to allow anonymous access & default access w/ 'password'. The damage he did was to the ego of the military - it's OK to point out the Emperor has no clothes, but be darned sure that the general can't hear you when you comment on his missing pants. After all, he's the one with the guns.
In general, he's willing to be tried as a hacker, but the US govt is waving the terrorist flag around & that's a charge he's not willing to face. Also, the damage claim is fairly ridiculous, these were unsecured servers - anything on them was long ago compromised. Charging him for the price of cleanup that would have had to be done if a new admin had pointed out that someone had set the FTP server to anonymous is stupid.
Not really. Regular US citizens don't really have any power anymore. We get to choose which person we want to screw us over, that is about it. Its pretty much a given fact that everyone running for office is going to be a corrupt politician who has no intention of listening to us.
I think not, for someone accused of (amongst other things) obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", "causing the US military district of Washington became inoperable" and specifying that it "occurred immediately after 9/11", I don't think he'll have it easy.
He'll have to be in solitary for his own protection.
In his own words from http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/jul/09/weekend7.weekend2:
simon
He gained unauthorized access to improperly secured defense department computers, due to the damn admins not doing their job, in the months following the Septer 11 attacks, and is ......
There. Fixed that for ya. Wouldn't want you to leave out significant information.
"We regularly extradite suspects to the USA, yet the USA refuses to do the same for people living in the USA wanted for crimes in the UK."
There have been several people extradited both ways, very few are controversial.
I remember there was an absolutely despicable incident where the US military refused to allow a soldier to attend a British coroner's investigation about a British soldier killed in a friendly fire incident.
That incident was a complete disgrace and has undoubtedly strained US-UK relations purely to prevent some incompetent guy from looking bad, but it has little to do with the US-UK extradition treaty (due to military exemption).
$900k was IMO the cost of securing systems that were not secure in the first place.
You won't find a society anywhere on earth which doesn't have such laws.
Well my country doesn't extradite its own citizens.
That is true. Politically the UK is the greatest coward, or the shrewdest player depending on how you see it. The real question has always been, are we more the bitch of the US or Europe? By playing both sides we've been able to prop up an untenable economy for almost a decade.
When push comes to shove on legal matters however the so called 'hacker' will get off. An appeal to Europe will win, because nobody is allowed to extradite to countries with a record of torture. What we have with the US is a 'special relationship'. What we have with Europe is a legal relationship. The legal relationship between the UK and Europe trumps any ill defined political convenience that benefits the UK and US, mostly in global trade matters.
And, though I hate to say it because it could seem insulting, we now have more to lose by getting into a spat with Europe than we have by upsetting the USA.
The real loser of course is the people of the United Kingdom. Having lost our sovereignty we no longer have control over the criminal justice of our own people. It is merely a case of appealing to a bigger to bully to see off a lesser one.
For more than any other reason, if the media keep a spotlight on this I expect the guy to walk free (as he should imho given the morality/ethics of the alleged crime) because this episode is embarrasing to all in revealing the duplicity, asymmetry and corruption of the so called 'special relationship'
Just when has the US refused to extradite a suspect to the UK say in the last ten years?
Very recently actually. When British journalist Terry Lloyd was shot by US forces in Iraq, the US refused to cooperate or extradite any troops to face trial here. The case had to dropped entirely (just this week).
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I assume youre talking about this?
"Article 8
Extradition Procedures and Required Documents. Article 8 establishes the procedures and describes the documents that are required to support a request for extradition. All requests for extradition shall be submitted through the diplomatic channel. Among other requirements, Article 8(3) provides that a request for the extradition of a person sought for prosecution must be supported by: (a) a copy of the warrant or order of arrest issued by a judge or other competent authority; (b) a copy of the charging document, if any; and (c) for requests to the United States, such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offense for which extradition is sought. The Treaty will not change the evidentiary burden required for extradition requests to the United States. ***However, under the new Treaty, the evidentiary requirements for extradition from the United Kingdom are lowered from a "prima facie" standard to what in practice will constitute a U.S. probable cause standard."***
The standards are the same, the UK bar was lowered to meet the US standard..
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Rachid Ramda was responsible for the series of terrorist attacks in France around 1995. Yet it took 10 fscking years to get him extradited over the channel. This guy is responsible for the death of dozens of people! And he wasn't even a subject of Her Majesty.
But when the Bush admin snaps its fingers, lapdog Brown's government is ready to comply.
So yeah, the UK is the US's bitch.
Oh yes, Americans are the only ones sitting in foriegn Jails on drug charges... couldn't possibly happen to anyone else... like that brit who got 6 years in Dubai for having 0.003g of cannabis on his shoe.
You kinda totally missed the point: America will never be a "free" country while the owners of the Federal Reserve Banks are mainly foreign. Do the citizens of the USA have a right to know who are the owners of the Federal Reserve Banks? If not, why not?
Why would US troops operating in Iraq, goto trial in the UK?Civilian court no less?
They weren't punished in the US.
I'm tired of reading this rant. I once bid several cents per e-mail to send out thousands of e-mails a month for a government organization. Ridiculous, right? Anybody can run sendmail in a colo for $100 a month. What the actual term of the agreement doesn't say, is that the e-mails were to be sent from an application we were to develop with features unique to the organization, and the e-mail addresses were to be collected using a marketing website and software package that we were to construct, maintain, and promote. We also had to provide two dedicated T1s, four dedicated servers, a load balancer, as well as design and produce all the print marketing materials to promote the new service. All of these things were included in the contract, but we were only paid per e-mail sent. Things aren't always as they appear at first glance.
In the case of the bolt, it's not an ordinary bolt. Normal bolts are never individually tested, a single bolt from the lot is taken and destructively tested. In the case of the expensive DD bolts, they are generally one of a kind, limited production, bolts designed for one purpose. In addition, they are generally non-destructively tested, which means that they are each individually subjected to the forces that they are rated for, and then examined. This is expensive.
As far as "cost plus" goes, how else do you suggest doing it? Whenever I bid a contract I estimate cost, then add profit and that is the price. In the case of the e-mail contract I described above, I calculated the cost then decided on a fair profit. After that, I made best case, worst case, and average case estimates for e-mail volume. I ended up basing the per e-mail bid on the worst case number of messages sent. In other words, the bid price was ((cost + [slightly less than fair] profit) / worst case estimate). As it turned out, we never got close to the worst case, we were always between average and best case, so the profit was good. Had it been a "cost plus" contract, it probably would have been less expensive for the government overall, however, the risk would have been theirs, not mine (if our software was ineffective or underused, we could have potentially lost money).
Cost plus is most often used when something has to be built that is either difficult or impossible to estimate. If I were to ask you to build something that nobody has ever built before, and intended to have you sign a contract saying that you would construct it for that price, you'd probably greatly overestimate the actual cost, because you would have to make sure you don't end up too far in the red. The costs are evaluated and approved by an oversight group (like government engineers), so they can make sure project costs are really necessary. In addition, the records are audited and unnecessary cost is often disallowed. Cost plus isn't perfect, but it's less expensive in the long run then having the contractors make guesstimates then inflate them to deal with the risk and uncertainty.
In the long run, the single most disingenuous thing I've seen in government contract is the blatant racism and sexism. Females and minorities are given preferential treatment because of their race or gender. Depending on the contract, their price proposals are also evaluated differently as well, often getting a 5% discount. In other words, a $100k bid placed by a MBE will be read as $95k when compared to other bids. The process is not only unfair and discriminatory, but can result in less qualified firms winning contracts on the basis of quotas. I was told by a colleague once that a bid of theirs was rejected, although they were both the low and most responsible bidder, because the contracting agency wanted to meet their quota.
Who am I to tell you though, you've got it all figured out. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, start a company, and win some contracts. All you've got to do is demonstrate that you can do the work, and bid low.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill