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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."
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."
1) Where did he do the crime? Why should be be sucked into the nastiest jurisdiction that his packets passed through? It's a genuinely unresolved issue, legally.
2) The huge asymmetry between extradition in either direction, coupled with the posturing of US officials, has reduced willingness by everyone including the courts to see US prosecution as likely to be fair and proportionate. Eventually posturing has consequences.
Rgds
Damon
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Someone needs to remind the Brits that if Love didn't want to do the time, he shouldn't have done the crime
He can do the time in Britain where he lives and was located when he committed the crime. That sounds much more fair than sending him to a crazy country that locks up a startlingly large fraction of its own population.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Other than the precedence reinforcement (good thing), I don't see much news here. The US and UK would have done the same as the other if the situation was reversed. The guy didn't kill any one. And even if he had, the conclusion would have been the same both ways if he faced execution.
1) It doesn't matter "where" he did the crime. Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. I would suggest it matters more where the prosecutors have bothered to build a case against him. The court's ruling suggests that no British prosecutor has bothered to do it, and so a fair trial could only be performed in the US, where there is interest in seeing justice done.
Your strawman about jurisdictions that his packets passed through is ridiculous. The US would like to try him because many of his ultimate victims were US entities, including branches of the US government. The prosecution not merely premised on his packets having passed through the US.
2) How often has the US refused an extradition request by the UK? You're really suggesting that the US is at fault because Britain hardly ever asks for extradition -- possibly because the US is much more effective at punishing criminals who have victimized citizens of the UK.
1) I'm not even going to discuss this as it's clearly utter bollocks; two seconds of thought should, if you aren't a swivel-eyed rightard, reveal why that is the case.
2) The US does not extradite its citizens except in very rare circumstances, even to countries with better-functioning criminal justice systems (i.e. most western democracies, though the UK's is increasingly creaking at the seams). Nobody requests extradition from the US because there are only so many times you can ask the same question, getting the same answer, before you admit it's pointless and stop doing that. Definition of insanity, etc.
If somebody empties your bank accounts, empties your retirement accounts, and misappropriates all your title to real property, should they stay free simply because they didn't commit a violent crime (and are mentally unstable and have eczema)?
Stop being an apologist for a script kiddie. It's not a good look, and doing it effectively is apparently beyond your capability.
Nobody requests extradition from the US because there are only so many times you can ask the same question, getting the same answer, before you admit it's pointless and stop doing that. Definition of insanity, etc.
Then it's time to drop those extradition treaties as nonfunctional and dangerous to your own citizens.
Any proof that he actually stole anything of value or profited from his so-called crimes? This was more like a drunk teenager climbing the fence into my backyard, looking around, and maybe making a commotion. Yeah, some Americans' response might be to shoot without asking questions, but fortunately, the British know better.
Bullshit. Plenty of IRA members - murderers & actual terrorists when the word meant something - fled to the US and were never sent back.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Maybe, maybe not. The UK still has the concepts of "parole" and "suspended sentences" -- the broken American Federal prison system did away with those in the 1980s. The US "justice" system is too harsh for anyone other than a violent, hardened criminal to deserve it.
I say we laugh in the faces of people who think that non-violent criminals should be subject to the whims of the overly-harsh US "justice" system. Beating ill people -- sign of a true sociopath.
"He can do the time in Britain where he lives and was located when he committed the crime. That sounds much more fair..."
No it doesn't. While what the person did was illegal in both countries the parties harmed were in America. This is literally why we have extradition treaties. Furthermore, the basis for the rationale for not sending him to the US seems to be that if he's convicted he'll find US prison unpleasant. Not that he will be turtured, not that he will be excecuted, not that he would even face an unfair trial, but that he would not be happy in prison.
Also, some one please explain to me what "antibiotic-resistant eczema" is. I get eczema myself; it's very itchy, dry skin and I treat it with special moisturizers when it gets bad. The first deffinition i find on a search includes this, "The exact cause of eczema is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to an overactive response by the body's immune system to an irritant". As far as I've ever understood eczema it is not caused by bacterial infection so how can it be antibiotic resistant? On a (admittedly quick) search I could find no reference of this disorder.
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The US prison system systematically violates basic human rights. There was even a prison that was on total lock-down for 23 years. The US justice system is rigged and based on extensive intimidation and plea bargains.
In the essence, there is zero justice in the US and it's ridiculous to even ask for the extradition of anyone. Extradition treaties are not automatic processes, they are decided case by case, and human rights issues and the expectation (or suspected lack of) a fair trial plays a substantial role. They can also be overruled by political decision, although that's rare.
In any case, kudos to the UK Supreme Court for making the right decision. The UK can consider extraditing suspects for crimes that give 3 years in the UK but 30+ years in the US once US citizens have stopped making their 'don't drop the soap' "jokes"...
Considering that the UK jails 1/5 of the people that the US does (per capita), I'd say the UK is doing fine. Meanwhile, the US wastes a lot of tax money and lives being the greatest incarcerator in the world. Kudos to the UK courts for not throwing another person into the pit of the US injustice system.
The Brits are very aware of this, which is why many people (including his own defence team) are recommending he faces trial in the UK.
He will at least get a fair trial here.
His crime wasn't hacking, it was embarrassing the U.S. Gov't.
There is NO excuse for having your public IP address space exposing well known, script-kiddie flaws. Every one of those Federal Agencies has teams of people who are responsible for securing their systems, not to mention external contractors performing penetration tests.
He didn't do anything creative, just run common scanners against a wide IP space, and run point-and-click tools. If he found all that with so little effort, you can bet others did, too.
SQL Injection has been the OWASP #1 for about a decade now.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
UK takes cars of its citizens. Protects them from extradition, gives them tax-supported healthcare. The US? Land of medical bankruptcies, guns for any yob who can fog a mirror, killings by police, and excessive prison sentencing. US would have been better off if the "founding fathers" had been shot as traitors and it had remained a British colony. Britain even ended slavery 30 years before the US did.
" Extradition treaties usually only require that the act be criminal in both countries. " not 100% true it may also require that the punishment be in the same order of magnitude or exclude specific punishment , e.g. see article 7 of extradiction treaty French-US where the death penalty must be excluded as possible punishment. . What do you know about the UK treaty ? If tehre is something similar and the announced prosecution goal is e.g. 99 years in the US or something in the order of magnitudes a few year in UK is not the same type of punishment. That is why even if there is a treaty between the US and many countries , you gotta look in the detail before stating they have no reason to not extradite.
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On one hand that's bullshit. A court if law should not function in such a way.
On the other hand, that sounds terribly reasonable until you actually look into things
From: https://www.theguardian.com/ne...
A) After an initial arrest the UK chose to not prosecute him at all for his crimes. Perhaps if the UK had sought to send him through their own legal system initally things would have been different.
B) He was facing a possible 99 year sentence in the US. If his crimes were as harmless as you state then it certainly would have been less. Take the case of Babar Ahmad ( https://www.theguardian.com/uk... ). He was extradited, sentenced to 12 years, and was released to the UK after only one year because of his cooperation with the authorities.
C) He's being accused of crimes far more serious than you make out. "...but the US government, which accused him of helping to orchestrate and wage cyber-attacks on official websites including those belonging to the Federal Reserve, Nasa and the US army between 2012 and 2013. Love, they claim, along with three other unnamed co-conspirators in Australia and Sweden, stole sensitive military data and personal information belonging to more than 100,000 government employees. He is wanted for crimes including conspiracy, fraud and identity theft in no fewer than three judicial US districts – the Southern District of New York, New Jersey, and the Eastern District of Virginia – a record unmatched by any foreign or domestic terrorist (but by at least one other hacker)."
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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.
The problem is, other nations are starting to realize that our court system has turned into some sort of Kafkaesque parody of justice. We have a Stalin-sized Gulag, famed for its state-sponsored regime of anal rape. Almost everyone in the Gulag was coerced into a false confession in a process euphemistically called "plea bargaining". No self-respecting nation would surrender their citizen to be ground up by that sort of infernal meat grinder.
Shame on our judicial oligarchy. They are making us look like some sort of North Korean dystopia.
Thing is, the US encourages plea bargaining, and punishes people who dare exercise their right to a fair trial (if they lose) disproportionately. The reduced sentences you mention are often only given with a plea bargain.
Picture this: you're falsely accused of a crime and too poor to afford a good lawyer. Would you rather risk 30 years in prison, no parole, at trial, or will you plead guilty to a lesser felony, do a year in prison, and come out marked as a felon for life. Many people are pressured into doing the latter even if they're not actually guilty of anything.
The US "justice" system is evil, and generally run by evil/corrupt people.
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.
Plenty of IRA members - murderers & actual terrorists when the word meant something - fled to the US and were never sent back.
Some IRA members weren't extradited because they claimed that their crimes were political in nature, and the US along with other countries (including the UK) has a prohibition on extradicting people for political crimes.
Ironically enough the US rules on how to handle the potential extraditions of political crimes were at least partly based on an analysis of UK case law.
Aaron Schwartz is haunting the U.S. extradition effort from the grave.
AC Nor was the USA mil and federal/state police on the east coast. Thats why the UK used the SAS a lot.
The flow of advanced weapon systems and support to Ireland stopped.
Every phone number and call in and out of Ireland was collected on. All international communications between Ireland to the USA.
Voice prints too when that was still an advanced science in real time.
UK collection was not just between the UK to Ireland but for all of Ireland. The USA was just another nation to track calls back to.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Really, that comment is "insightful"? Do you deserve to have your house vandalized or robbed bcause you haven't locked every single door and window?
As an American citizen, I am sick of the U.S. Government being the world's bully and I really and truly hope that Britain takes action to make non-extradition a law. If the British Parliament feels the need to block extradition, then I support them 100%. The U.S. Government does all kinds of shady shit while standing on some kind of shale-based, moral high ground and it's time we get kicked in the teeth and reminded of our place.
No. It doesn't. Even the most heinous crimes will not pull more than 25 years in prison in the UK. Or are you suggesting that Lauri Love did anything more eggregious than killing dozens of people in a terror attack, running a child sex ring and being the Capo di tutti i capi of the largest mob in the UK at the same time? Extradicting someone facing 99 years in prison for not even destroying any property is thus totally out of proportion.
No, it's quite common for US cops (generally hired from the dregs of society) to do things like that and worse. Start reading about civil forfeiture abuse, where travelers and business owners are relieved of valuables and cash under "suspicion" without trial. Obama and Holder tried to curtail this, Trump and Sessions fully support it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
"The era of the U.S. Department of Justice as world police is over."
In other words, extradition is an ex-tradition.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The Americans aren't interested in justice, they're interested in revenge. That's why the prison system has one of the highest murder and rape rates in the world. Far as I know, only Australia, China and North Korea are worse. That's not justice, that's sickness. You need treatment.
He's also only accused and has a right to a fair trial. One where justice is not only done, it is seen to be done. That is impossible in the US. Nobody gets a fair trial in the US, we all know that. Fix the system and maybe people will believe you.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But the GP is talking about actual terrorists, people who were directly involved in killing others, and yes, he's right, they weren't extradited.
I, also, was referring to IRA members who where actual terrorists. The fact that they killed people does not mean that their crime was not political.
No, there's no precedent in UK case law that says it's not murder if you did it for political reasons
Of course not. There is UK case law that says you can't be extradited if you committed murder under certain circumstances for political reasons. The political incidence test as used by the US and UK was defined in In Re Castioni, where the court found:
that the offence which the prisoner had committed was incidental to and formed a part of political disturbances, and therefore was an offence of a political character within the meaning of the statute, and the prisoner could not be surrendered, but was entitled to be discharged from custody
The accused in the case had, in fact, been charged with murder. There was little doubt that he was guilty. Yet the English court found that he could not be extradited as his crime was political in nature.
The US applied the same standard to IRA terrorists, which led to the interesting conclusion in Quinn v Robinson that an IRA member who committed murder in England could be extradited, but if he had committed the same act in Northern Ireland he would not be extraditable.
The US and UK later negotiated some revisions to the extradition laws, which have placed tighter limits on what constitutes political crimes. However, during the timespan we are discussing, refusing to extradite some IRA terrorists was consistent with both US and UK extradition laws.
And this particular case was a political crime, which means the prohibition on extradition is not only lawful but required by British and American law. Correct?
Political crimes are typically ones committed against your own nation or an occupying power. He could have tried arguing that his crimes were political; it would have been an interesting defence without any precedent of which I'm aware. I doubt it would have worked, but it would have been interesting.
In any event, he didn't make that argument ergo it doesn't apply in this case. Instead he chose the "Americans are mean" defence, which has apparently served him well.
Not if we prosecuted fewer crimes. Start ignoring simple drug possession, even sale among adults. Moral laws, like laws against gambling or online gambling, out the window. Same goes for laws against sex between consenting adults of sound mind. Public drinking? Same thing.
Live and let live, let people do what they want to with their own bodies and minds. Getting rid of crimes where people are only hurting themselves would go a long way towards freeing up the courts to give everyone a fair trial in more serious cases.
Wut.
Aaron Shwartz was threatened with 35 years for what was, at worst, trespassing. That's what the Feds do - threaten draconian prison terms that would make Saudi Arabia blush in order to get people to accept plea deals, saving the prosecutor the work of having an actual trial. That's why Chelsea Manning pled to a 35 year sentence despite it being a much longer sentence than spies who sold secrets for actual money after Obama's unlawful command influence in her trial - something that has gotten other soldiers out of discharges.
The UK refrained from even investigating organized child-rape gangs because they were run by certain politically favored groups. Then the UK had to put a hold on every rape case in the country and review them all after four cases in a short span fell apart because the police or prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. Stop pretending that your chamber pot smells of roses.
Nobody gets a fair trial in the US, we all know that.
* Citation needed.
The US court system definitely has its issues, but you're drastically overstating the situation. Lots of people get fair trials in the US. It has an independent judiciary and lots of guarantees for people accused of crimes (right to a jury trial, right to a lawyer, right to examine the evidence against you, etc.). You weaken your argument when you distort the facts.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Bullshit...
US Requests
41 requests to extradite UK Citizens from the UK, of which 28 were agreed.
21 requests to extradite USA Citizens from the UK, of which 12 were agreed.
UK Requests
25 requests to extradite UK Citizens from the USA, of which 20 were agreed.
8 requests to extradite USA Citizens from the USA, of which 5 were agreed.
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