UK Blocks Extradition of Hacker Gary McKinnon
Home Secretary Theresa May says extradition would breach McKinnon's human rights.
The extradition of Gary McKinnon to the United States has been blocked. According to the BBC, Home Secretary Theresa May says there's no question that McKinnon is seriously ill and that the extradition warrant against him should be withdrawn. According to May, whether or not McKinnon should face trial in the United Kingdom is now up to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC.
"[McKinnon] has Asperger's syndrome, and suffers from depressive illness," the BBC quotes May as saying "The legal question before me is now whether the extent of that illness is sufficient to preclude extradition. After careful consideration of all of the relevant material, I have concluded that Mr McKinnon's extradition would give rise to such a high risk of him ending his life that a decision to extradite would be incompatible with Mr McKinnon's human rights."
McKinnon is accused of scanning over 73,000 U.S. government computers (including NASA and Pentagon machines) and gaining access to 97 of them with his dial-up modem and some off-the-shelf software. He allegedly took over 2,000 computers offline at the U.S. Army Military District of Washington for 24 hours and disabled a network of 300 machines at a Naval weapons station in New Jersey. His antics cost the U.S. government a reported $700,000 in damages. McKinnon's hacking was, he claims, an effort to uncover X-Files type information regarding UFOs that he thought the government was trying to hide.
McKinnon has been battling extradition to the United States for a decade.

I still think this is some kind of disinformation being spread but if it's true then the people in charge of security should be the ones being interrogated.
What a dumb excuse...
Cheers!
I still think this is some kind of disinformation being spread but if it's true then the people in charge of security should be the ones being interrogated.
Please note this quote:
"McKinnon has been battling extradition to the United States for a decade."
This happened back in 2002, 56K modems were still pretty standard even for that time...now trying to do that now? Yeah, no, ain't going to happen.
it makes me socially awkward and clumsy... sign me up again...
at least that way i would have some awesome skills and an excuse for being socially awkward and clumsy
with that said, i dont believe anyone who has a mental disorder should EVER be shielded from the law.
someone whos a retard kills people, i believe put him to death, he will never get better
same with people who decide to stop taking medication and turn violent, they will not get better and will become a danger when they decide i don't need meds anymore and stop taking them.
For over a decade we've heard American politicians and military types saying that Gary will be fried or placed in jail until he rots... no wonder there was fear that he would take his own life.
Now the UK government needs to decide if there is a further case for him to answer with regards to UK law, again another correct choice. I hope they take his medical conditions into account and also accept that for the last decade his life he has been under the most intense fear and that the conditions placed upon him have caused massive problems for his medical condition. We need to accept that he committed a serious crime but also that there are factors that could be considered mitigating for a lot of it.
I think we need to leave it to medical experts and the UK courts to deal with now.
modem speed had nothing to do with it. Basically he was running a perl script against .gov and NASA servers that looked for administrator accounts with no password set, it wasn't rocket science.
Doesn't matter at that point really what kind of hardware / software firewall you have in place if you don't actualy bother to set the admin password. Previous posters are right - the people running these servers should have been fired and probably charged with criminal negligence, because at the end of the day McKinnon was only the guy they caught.
Criminal ? Knowing the truth is a fundamental human right !
Conservative estimates show there are over 2 million dead in Afghanistan and Iraq since the 'war on terror' began. You tell me who the REAL criminals are !
Your vote and tax dollar make YOU an accessory to crimes against humanity ! How do you plead ?
pEACe
TROLL OR PLANT ?