Gary McKinnon

[andrewducker]

Can anyone explain to me, in nice simple English, why we shouldn't be extraditing a convicted hacker to the country where he commited the crime?  It really does seem like an open and shut case to me, and I'm baffled why some people seem to think it's wrong.

I'm clearly missing something - can someone explain it to me?

Comments

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

It's because their legal system is foreign and therefore wrong.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Also, because the US legal system is often simply brutal and wrong. Not extraditing prisoners to the US seems like a very reasonable and humane thing for civilized nations to do.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Because we don't trust their courts to give him a fair trial, I think.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Oh, and also it's not clear-cut that that is where he committed the crime.

[drplokta]

There's some room for doubt about where he committed the crime, given that he was in the UK for the entire time.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

a convicted hacker

He has not yet been convicted, because he has not yet been tried.

[andrewducker]

Good point. I was mistaking his bail conditions for something else.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

He has not been convicted, but has publically admitted he did carry out the crimes.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

There are several indications that McKinnon will not receive a fair trial in the US. As he is a UK citizen, it's our government's duty to protect him from that.

- He has been threatened by US prosecutors with a maximum jail sentence (30 years) in a high security with prison if he refused to change his plea.

- He is on the aspergers/autism spectrum and it is common for such individuals not to be fairly tried.

- The US military are angry and are trying to take it out of McKinnon's hide. The UK justice system doesn't have the same bone to pick and will hopefully be more reasonable.

- Extradition isn't fair right now. The US can happily extradite anyone from the UK they want to try in the US; the UK cannot do the same. So on princple we should resist extraditions.

- It's *not* cut and dried where McKinnon committed the crime. Some legal interpretations say that the crime was committed where the computers were compromised (the US), some that it's about where McKinnon was when he committed the crime.

[andrewducker]

Thanks!

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I should add to the aspergers/autism bit - we don't try spectrum people fairly in the UK either. But we're better than the US and we're improving rapidly too. My mum is actually doing a lot of work on improving trials for dyslexics and that crosses over into this area, so I hear quite a lot about this from them. :)

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Unless he's tried in a military court, the US military can't do too much against him. American military lawyers don't fare well against decent civilian lawyers, in my observation.

I thought prosecutorial threats of maximum punishment was a normal event in most modern countries? All the other points make sense to me; I wouldn't want McKinnon extradited if he can be tried under British criminal laws instead. Also, are we going to draft 12 British tourists to make up his jury of peers?

disclosure: I've had a military lawyer represent me once. It's better to go in debt and hire a civilian one.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

> I thought prosecutorial threats of maximum punishment
> was a normal event in most modern countries?

This is illegal in the United Kingdom.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

I see. That makes better sense than requiring a competent defender to make sure you get a fair punishment.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It is not done in our legal system, but it is commonplace in many countries. And ity is not as though the prosecution get to decide the sentence. Following a guilty verdict, both sides are given an opportunity to petition the judge for an appropriate sentence, but the final decision rests with the judge, as it does in the UK.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Because there's concern that they will punish him disproportionately to his offence, for political reasons. I feel gutted about this, the poor man.

[pisica.livejournal.com]

Because America is evil?

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

Also, as I understand it, he's being extradited under laws which were made to fight terrorism, when what he did was pretty clearly not terrorism by most definitions.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

What a lot of other people have said. One of the main concerns is that the legal procedure being used (plead guilty and get a low sentence or face a hugely increased sentence if you fight the case) is flat-out illegal in the UK. Here, an accused may ask for an indication of the sentence he or she would receive after pleading guilty, but outright plea-bargaining is forbidden.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

We don't have a plea bargain system, but a judge may take a guilty plea into account when passing sentence.

[lebeautemps.livejournal.com]

My source tells me that the reason they don't have plea bargaining is that essentially matters would devolve into simple haggling.

Cue Life of Brian gourd haggling scene.

Ahem. Sorry. I do feel strongly that this guy is being fed to the wolves but at the same time, if someone committed a crime against this country, wouldn't we want them tried here in principle? Tough one.

[meihua.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying you do, but if you hold the position that extradition should be available to both countries, you should oppose the extradition of Gary McKinnon. The existing treaty is essentially one-way, in that UK citizens can be extradited to the US but not vice versa.

[andrewducker]

That's not actually true. You can be extradited _without evidence_ to the USA, (and Australia, Canada and New Zealand) - everywhere else in the world they need to have enough evidence to convict.

And it has now been ratified - it was ratified in 2006, three years after we put it into action ourselves. which means it's reciprocal, and has been for three years.

See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extradition_Act_2003

[meihua.livejournal.com]

Mmkay, maybe I'm wrong there. I've been told by people who know about laws and stuff that, practically speaking, the US can extradite and we can't. But I don't have direct evidence to back that up.

[lebeautemps.livejournal.com]

Extradition should be reciprocal, yes. My source confirms that this has been the case for some time - as well as the Act itself, there are long-standing guidelines as to the process, which sound completely sensible and even-handed for both sides.

Apart from whether this chap will get a fair hearing, there is a financial principle: if this chap has committed a crime and if the victims of that crime want to bring charges, or have charges brought on their behalf, shouldn't it the victim country that pays for the costs of prosecution? The alternative is that the UK Taxpayer foots the bill for a UK-based case which is not reasonable.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Because British intelligence hasn't quite absorbed all of that UFO data that McKinnon found? ;)

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

I would also like to add that what McKinnon did was run some perl scripts that identified machines with blank or default passwords. If the computer systems are as sensitive as the US is making out then there was serious negligence on their part. Under the law that doesn't make the crime any lesser - it's akin to stealing from a house with the door open - but from a common sense perspective the whole debacle seems out of scale with what happened. He downloaded a few files. He didn't train killers or build a bomb, in fact there's no evidence he was doing anythign other than being a geek getting a rush from downloading NASA files, no evidence of malice. Frankly there were probaly dozens of people in those systems, and he just happens to be the one that wasn't careful covering his tracks. How do we think he got wind of there existence in the first place?!

And more broadly the asymetrical extradition treaty we have with the US is an abomination.

[andrewducker]

He did also leave the message "US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year...I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels." - which was just asking for it...

And the extradition treaty was only asymmetrical from 2003-2006, when the US ratified it...

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

Copied from one of my respones on the aspergers group:

Being an aspie who in the past may have tinkered with networked computer systems, I feel that a better use of government resources and a more fair approach would have been to issue a threat of prosecution to McKinnon. Most likely he would have been scared s**tless that the authorities were on to him and were considering prosecution. The authorities would fix the holes that had been identified, the public purse would be spared the huge cost so far, and McKinnon could get on with his life, most likely being a highly useful member of staff in some IT department.

I'm not at all worried about the McKinnon's of this world, for my tax money he's been punished enough, learned his lesson and I think the authorities should focus on real threats from people who have openly declared that they want to wipe us from the face of the earth.


Admitedly that message he posted was pretty dumb, but I'd rather have my taxes spent on proscuting real threats rather then punishing dumb actions.

[andrewducker]

Oh, absolutely. I don't think he was malicious - just an idiot.