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: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.