Slashdot Mirror
Should British Hacker Lauri Love Be Tried In America? (theguardian.com)
A 31-year-old autistic man in the U.K. is suspected of hacking U.S. government computer systems in 2013 -- and he has one final chance to appeal his extradition. An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian
Even if Love is guilty, however, there are important legal and moral questions about whether he should be extradited to the US -- a nation that has prosecuted hackers with unrivalled severity, and one where Love could be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison... His remaining hope for mercy is a final appeal against extradition in the high court in November. Love's hope is for a full and fair trial in Britain.
Even if he is found guilty in a British court of the most serious crimes in the US government's indictment, his legal team estimate that he faces just a few months in prison. Failure means Love will be flown to a holding facility in New York, placed on suicide watch and probably forced to take antidepressants, prior to a trial. If he refuses to accept a plea deal and is convicted, he will face $9m (£6.8m) in fines and, experts estimate, a prison term of up to 99 years, a punishment illustrative of the US's aggressive sentencing against hackers under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Naomi Colvin, from the human rights group the Courage Foundation, tells the Guardian that "Lauri's case is critically important in determining the reach of America's unusually harsh punitive sanctions for computer crimes."
Even if he is found guilty in a British court of the most serious crimes in the US government's indictment, his legal team estimate that he faces just a few months in prison. Failure means Love will be flown to a holding facility in New York, placed on suicide watch and probably forced to take antidepressants, prior to a trial. If he refuses to accept a plea deal and is convicted, he will face $9m (£6.8m) in fines and, experts estimate, a prison term of up to 99 years, a punishment illustrative of the US's aggressive sentencing against hackers under the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Naomi Colvin, from the human rights group the Courage Foundation, tells the Guardian that "Lauri's case is critically important in determining the reach of America's unusually harsh punitive sanctions for computer crimes."
He did not commit any crime while in the US jurisdiction so no. He was in the UK at the time and subject to UK law so he should only be tried in the UK. To do otherwise means that the UK has lost all sovereignty because then while in the UK you don't just have to follow UK law but also US law over which the UK has no control.
Extradition is intended to prevent someone committing a crime while in a country's jurisdiction and then running away to a foreign country to escape answering for it. If the US does not think that UK law is strict enough to prevent hacking attacks like this the solution is to block all internet connections from the UK not try to enforce US law on someone who has probably never even visited the US.
The US government allegedly needed to spend $5,000,000 on improving security after the incident. Of course, those were the same improvements that they needed to make even before the incident happened, judging by the fact that it was able to happen in the first place. Actual damages caused were... were there any?
It is not all but impossible. In the last extradition review, conducted by a panel headed by Sir Scott Baker, they found the following:
That the US made 130 extradition requests to the UK.
That the UK refused 10 of those requests.
That the UK submitted 54 extradition requests to the US.
The US refused none of them.
Of the 120 requests accepted by the UK, 77 were extradited. The rest were either pending in the UK legal system, the person voluntarily went to the US, or the case became moot for other reasons.
Of the 54 requests accepted by the US, 38 were extradited. The rest either voluntarily went to the UK or the case became moot for other reasons.
You'll note that none of the UK extradition requests were pending the US legal system. If the standards in the treaty are met, the U.S. Constitution offers little in the way to prevent extradition to the UK. Partly that is because as a treaty, it is part of the Supreme Law of the Land (Article 6, Clause 2), and partly because the US Constitution poses almost no barrier to extradition.
The US extradites its citizens quite often and quite readily. Some countries refuse to extradite their citizens, even if there is a valid extradition treaty (see France and Brazil). So long as there is a valid extradition treaty, and the crime charged satisfies the dual criminality component of those treaties, the US has and will extradite its citizens.
It is a suggestion that as nightmarish as it would be in general to be packed up and shipped to an unfamiliar country to face charges in an unfamiliar legal system where you could be imprisoned far away from family for the rest of your life, it's even worse if you are autistic.
The US doesn't have an extradition treaty with Qatar, so what's your point? In addition, the US has no such law on their books. The computer laws in question have equivalents in each country.