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.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.