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

[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.