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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.