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."

Comments

Duh

[Wiarumas]

From TFA: "Prosecutors allege that McKinnon hacked into than 90 computer systems belonging to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA between February 2001 and March 2002, causing $900,000 worth of damage.

McKinnon has acknowledged accessing the computers, but he disputes the reported damage and said he did it because he wanted to find evidence that America was concealing the existence of aliens."

Duh. The only reason this topic may recieve negative attention is because its the United States. Truth be told, that if this was ANY country, the same thing would have happened. What did he expect? We are talking about highly classified stuff. He may have not caused as much as the claimed damage, but he DID access them. In some countries, he would be executed...

Re:Duh

[G0rAk]

He committed several UK offences in the UK under both the Computer Misuse Act and the Data Protection Act. He would get a fair trial on these, I cant imagine why he wouldn't, and they do come with prison term sentences.

Re:I remember this guy

[Library Spoff]

He claimed to be looking for ufo evidence on us govt machines. Part of his story is that he found a file called 'alien officers'
err... they're not from the us. Doesn't mean they're from mars. he's an idiot who thought he was more leet than he was. Doesn't mean he should get life for it tho.

Re:one-way treaty

[The Dancing Panda]

Does this happen often? We don't really hear about it over here. Are there many criminals in the US that the UK wishes to have extradited?

I was always under the assumption that the people of the United States don't commit crimes worthy of extradition ;).

Re:one-way treaty

[SimonGhent]

However, if plays nice and owns up to all the stuff he says he didn't do but they claim he did

Not quite true.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/jul/09/weekend7.weekend2:

Gary was kept in a police station overnight. Then the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.' I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I said no, she was very, 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy.'"

Also, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/27/internationalcrime.hacking...

In a further twist, it has emerged that a crucial file containing details of the early meetings with the US prosecutors, at which the offers were apparently made, has gone missing from the office of McKinnon's solicitor. A laptop holding details of the same meetings was stolen from the car of one of his barristers.

Crappy retarded cliché

[Nicolas MONNET]

"And, really, if he couldn't do the time, he should not have done the crime."

I see your retarded old cliché and raise you a human right: punishment should be proportional to the crime. Did he kill anyone? Did he maim anyone? Did he steal anything? No, no and no, so why should he be punished more than someone who did?

Anyway, this nonsensical BS should be rejected by the European Court of Justice. Unlike the US Supreme court, it's not stacked with crypto-fascists like Antonin Scalia.

Re:I hope he wins

[Zordak]

My hope is that this gentleman wins. If he loses, he might be looking at several years of being treated like those folks at GITMO! And that's not something to look forward to.

I see you were going for the karma boost with the U.S. bashing, but looks like it didn't pay off this time. Please try again later.

And Gitmo? Seriously? If you're going to be a U.S. hater, at least say something credible. There is some legitimate debate to be had about whether it's fair to detain enemies captured on fields of battle in a place like Gitmo without due process, but that is wholly irrelevant to somebody who is going to be extradited according to treaty and tried in the courts with all of the constitutional due process protections that a citizen has. This guy will not end up in Gitmo. He'll spend a couple of years in Club Fed after he pleads out, then he'll be deported back to England.

Informative my ass

[Nicolas MONNET]

Did McKinnon kill someone? Maim someone?
The only "damage" he caused was the cost of fixing the systems that were already broken in the first place.
Your argument would have been only acceptable if he had, for example, broken into a air traffic control system and caused a plane to crash. That's not what he did.
Furthermore, his lack of truly criminal intent is evident by the fact that he did not try to hide his tracks. If someone wanted to cause real harm, it would be as simple as doing it through tor relays.
Anyway, the real shame in this whole case is on Tony Blair's murderous sellout. Not only did this asshole assist Bush in his war crimes, but he basically gave away the rights of britons, esp. considering that US citizens don't risk being deported to the UK.

Re:one-way treaty

[MagdJTK]

Friendly fire cases have recently caused a lot of controversy here in the UK. Americans have killed Britons in clearly marked convoys and the US refused to extradite or even court marshal them. In one case the coroner's report was actively impeded and a video from one of the US jets was only released when The Sun leaked it.

Re:Ah the Uk

[Thiez]

Since countries other than the UK and the US are irrelevant in this case, I assume you refer to prisons in the UK when you say 'foreign prisons'.

So tell me, how many Americans are in prison in the UK for having drugs, and how long are their sentences compared to what they would have gotten in the US?

This guy is almost my hero...

[Kidro]

Read the story on CNN.com and was floored by the last sentence.

"He was caught in 2002 after some of the software used in the attacks was traced back to his girlfriend's e-mail account." (emphasis added)

A "hacker" with a girlfriend?! Damn, if he only used the argument that he had a girlfriend and therefore couldn't be a hacker, he might be done with this whole mess already.

Re:Not a death penalty case

[AK Marc]

These systems were just sitting there and he went out of his way to do harm.

No one has even alleged that he caused actual harm. The only "costs" involved are the costs to upgrade the systems once the problems were found, and the egg on the DoD's face for some nutcase in England logging onto DoD systems with default passwords. If someone knocks on your door when you aren't home, tries the handle and sees it is open, walks in, looks around, and leaves without touching anything, should that be prosecuted as if he conducted a home invasion while everyone was there and killed a few babies while he was at it? That seems to be the US government's stance, and that's what's unreasonable and makes it look like we are blaming the victim. The victim is an ass that is lying (saying misleading things with the intention of deceiving, not actual untruths) about what happened and blaming the criminal for them leaving the figurative door to sensitive military secrets unlocked.

If you put a pool in your back yard, don't fence your back yard, and some kid drowns in your pool, you will be found 100% at fault. The parents of the kid that sent them out unsupervised and untrained as to what to do around water are completely off the hook for liability. The reason? "Attractive nussiance." I would assert that the entire DoD computer system is an attractive nussiance. It seems everyone wants to know what's on there. Just like children walking past a pool want to play in it. If you have your pool public, and unguarded, the person responsible for damage to it (considering a floating child damage, as that's more a material damage than this guy did to the DoD systems) is the owner, not the child that drowns in it, nor the negligent parents of the child. With a legal standard like that, I'd say that the only criminals in this case are the DoD and US government and not the guy in England. If you are going to put a military database on the Internet, you should pick passwords that aren't "password" or blank.