Gary McK­in­non is a so called ‘hacker’ who got into numer­ous US gov­ern­ment com­put­ers by the cun­ning strat­egy of using freely avail­able secu­rity tools against unde­fended sys­tems with­out fire­walls or secu­rity patches. So all in all a fairly seri­ous threat, not …

The US gov­ern­ment is fairly seri­ously embar­rassed par­tic­u­larly since this all hap­pened around 9/11 when talk of an elec­tronic Pearl Har­bour was all the rage among elec­tronic war­fare depart­ments look­ing for more fund­ing, sorry con­cerned about national secu­rity. It hap­pens that the US is claim­ing he did $700k’s worth of dam­age — Geeklawyer would like to see that fig­ure audited. Like the myth­i­cal losses due to music down­load­ing or the street value of seized drugs these fig­ure usu­ally relate more to the desire to catch head­line or impress judges than they do to any real loss. McK­in­non is clearly just some minor UFO nut­ter who’s no kind of men­ace to any­one: a slap on the wrists and pour­ing cof­fee into his moth­er­board would be pun­ish­ment enough.

Geeklawyer is not stand­ing up for McK­in­non who clearly com­mit­ted a crim­i­nal act and deserves to be pun­ished. But while there is an argu­ment for putting him on trial in the US there is also the same argu­ment for doing so in the UK: he com­mit­ted a crim­i­nal act in both juris­dic­tions and could be pun­ished in either. So why is the US bet­ter? It seems more human­i­tar­ian, if you trust & respect the other country’s legal sys­tem, to let him rot in his own country’s jail where he is sur­rounded by his own peo­ple and can get vis­its. Not to men­tion let­ting that coun­try pick up the tab for the jail term.
What­ever the answer to that is; what pisses Geeklawyer off might­ily is that here, yet again, we have an Eng­lish­man who is told by his gov­ern­ment that he must face a for­eign court with­out them hav­ing make a prima facie case to ours first unless he an per­suade the Home Sec­re­tary not to send him. Frankly, writ­ing a polite let­ter to the Home Sec­re­tary ask­ing him to say ‘no’ to the Amer­i­cans is a waste of good ink. And since when is a politi­cian an appro­pri­ate sub­sti­tute for a judge?