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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."
He didn't so much "hack into" the Pentagon & NASA, more just walked in by using the default Windows password.
The real criminals are the incompetent military heads who allow monkeys to be charge of I.T. security.
He should be punished in accordance with the law, so he should get at least the minimum sentence for each offense. Punishments are meant to do two things: punish the offender and make would be offenders think twice. i don't know if the guy should get life, but he should absolutely do time. i get that paranoia and not trusting the man is very hip and impresses the girl at the campus bookstore, but in the world of grown ups, digging into classified systems is a big deal.
Information is classified because we either don't want our enemies to know it. If they know it, they can figure out HOW we know it. Spies die. Missions fail. Soldiers die, and so forth. This isn't a case of a kid trying to learn how the phone system works. This guy is a criminal and he's a threat to US security. Which might not matter to you, but it matters to us. Letting him go free would be disastrous. All it would take is to wave some money under his nose, or have some hot woman ask him nicely and he'd give our enemies access to our secrets. You might not care if our people die, but we kinda do.
As for him not hurting anyone... he hurt 260M Americans. He also KNEW what he was doing was illegal. He couldn't be smart enough to do it and not be smart enough to know that it was a crime. If i point a loaded gun at someone and pull the trigger and miss, or the gun jams, i'm still a murderer (the charge would be "attempted"). If i get away with it once, i'm likely do it again. If i jimmy open the door of your apartment and walk around and then leave, i'm still guilty of breaking and entering, even if i don't steal anything or even damage the door.
Whoever was responsible for protecting those systems should prolly do some time as well.
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Why is it that the geek that the geek thinks that rape is treated lightly in the federal courts - which try these cases only rarely?