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BBC Profiles Extradited Cracker Gary McKinnon

Posted by timothy on from the well-he-is-pale dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has published a very good profile of Gary McKinnon. It discusses his motives and methods as well as raising the question as to whether he is a malicious 'hacker' or whether he was simply obsessed with finding info about UFOs and should be praised for finding security faults in what should be extremely secure systems. This should provided stimulus for some interesting discussion on Slashdot especially between us Brits and our American friends following the confirmation of his extradition to the USA."

3 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Should he be praised by Scr3wFace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is a very big difference between finding security faults, and exploiting them!

    1. Re:Should he be praised by chrb · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It's very likely there'll be some fall out regarding the recent House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Human Rights Annual Report. To quote:

      "We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the Government does not rely on such assurances in the future."

      This means that for terrorism crimes, it's very likely that extradition requests to the U.S. will have to be denied, since the U.S. carries out activities that the U.K. considers torture. And a "no-torture" guarantee is worthless, since the U.S. doesn't consider the acts as torture in the first place. At a minimum, expect this issue to be brought up in legal challenges to extradition.

  2. Blame Blair! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Unfortunately, our former PM, the worlds worst negotiator, Tony Blair went and signed a bilateral extradition treaty with the US (the one which removes the burden of providing any evidence before extraditing) When the US refused to sign their copy of the treaty he just let it ride.

    Thanks Tony, bang up job.