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UK High Court 'Perma-Bans' Efforts to Extradite Lauri Love to the US (arstechnica.com)

The U.K.'s High Court will not send Lauri Love to face trial in the U.S. for hacking government computer systems. Instead they've issued a final refusal to overturn Love's successful appeal of his extradition, Ars Technica reports, "effectively ending the extradition effort permanently." Love was originally arrested in the UK in October of 2013 after using an automated scanner to locate servers within a large range of IP addresses for SQL injection and ColdFusion vulnerabilities and then breaching vulnerable systems and installing Web shells to give him remote administrative-level access. He allegedly managed to compromise servers belonging to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Army, the Federal Reserve, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Love's attorneys fought the extradition on the grounds that Love -- who has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, severe depression, and antibiotic-resistant eczema -- would not get appropriate medical attention in a U.S. prison and would be at risk of suicide if he faced the potential 99-year prison term associated with the charges...

The U.S. had already essentially dropped efforts to extradite Love, but the ruling by the High Court now sets legal precedent that may bar future extraditions of British citizens on hacking charges. In a statement e-mailed to Ars, Naomi Colvin -- acting director of the Courage Foundation, an organization that has assisted Love in his extradition appeal -- said that as a result of the ruling, "there is now very little prospect of any British hacker ever finding themselves in the same position as Lauri Love or Gary McKinnon. Fifteen years of terrible public policy in which British hackers were left open to the vindictive instincts of US prosecutors have now been brought to an end."

Lauri Love told the site that with this ruling, "The era of the U.S. Department of Justice as world police is over."

3 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We can't send him to trial... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't come to America, where the US police have backlogs of un-processed evidence from rape cases but are more than happy to go after people for small quantities of drugs. Even if they aren't drugs -- recent case where some dumb cop arrested someone for suspicion of drug possession, which turned out to be donut crumbs.

    I'd take a higher rate of theft and even terrorism over a "justice" system that abuses its own citizens and tries to abuse people worldwide.

  2. Re:We can't send him to trial... by elrous0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That sounds much more fair than sending him to a crazy country that locks up a startlingly large fraction of its own population.

    As opposed to the crazy country that's about to imprison a man for making a joke on the internet?

    --
    SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
  3. Re:We can't send him to trial... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lauri Love didn't murder anyone. He hacked into US servers, because he wanted to find out whether UFO conspiracies are true. He didn't even do anything nefarious with the data he found or publish it.

    See that's the problem with you people, you're mentally insane when it comes to punishment and revenge. You miss all reasonableness and adequacy of punishment considerations. You're even fine with a systematic prison rape culture, but God forbid somebody shows a nipple on TV. You want everyone to be extradited swiftly to the US if it suits your agenda well, and at the same time threaten to invade the International Court of Justice with US military in case a US citizen might be accused there for crimes against humanity.

    In a nutshell, you're a bunch of fucking hypocrites.