NASA Hacker Wins Right to Extradition Hearing

E5Rebel writes "Gary McKinnon, the UK-based ex-systems administrator accused of conducting the biggest military hack of all time, has won the right to have his case against extradition to the U.S. heard by the House of Lords."

Plea bargain

[l33t.g33k]

From TFA:

They accused US investigators of trying to coerce McKinnon into accepting a secret plea bargain by threatening him with a long prison sentence if he did not collaborate.

Hmmm... that's a strange thing to criticize... this is a pretty standard practice in US criminal law - cooperate, forfeit your right to a trial, and you get off easy.

Wins Right?

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason, I thought rights were something you have, not something you earn.

Re:Plea bargain

[QuantumG]

I once had a police offer tell me that, in the UK and Australia, such things are illegal. This is actually just holding the police to the same standard as the rest of society. In the US there's laws against "making deals" but they don't apply to the police (or the government's prosecutors). For example:

519.030 Compounding a crime.
(1) A person is guilty of compounding a crime when:
(a) He solicits, accepts or agrees to accept any benefit upon an agreement or
understanding that he will refrain from initiating a prosecution for a crime; or
(b) He confers, offers, or agrees to confer any benefit upon another person upon
agreement or understanding that such other person will refrain from initiating
a prosecution for a crime.
(2) In any prosecution under this section, it is a defense that the benefit did not exceed
an amount which the defendant reasonably believed to be due as restitution or
indemnification for harm caused by the offense.
(3) Compounding a crime is a Class A misdemeanor.

So yeah, if I shoot you and say "I'll give you $10k to keep quiet" then I'm compounding a crime. If you accept then we're both compounding a crime.

Most the time the deals made in the US are of the "plead guilty" variety, not the "talk and we won't prosecute" variety, so this particular law wouldn't apply, but you get the idea.

The Law Lords

[flyingfsck]

is not the same thing as the House of Lords. The Law Lords is the highest court in the British Commonwealth.

Re:Tit for tat

[kegon]

So basically he's being punished because he embarrased a US institution that should know better about computer security.

You have got to be joking! He has only embarrassed himself, and now the joke is on him. Read this interview [bbc.co.uk]:

• He scanned 65,000 machines in about "8 minutes" by "tying together other people's machines" using a 56k dial up connection
• During a hacking escapade he chatted to an engineer who "saw" him, via WordPad
• His connection was so slow he wrote a clever program that "turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering". Juddering ?! What kind of display was he using, a slide projector ?
• He couldn't save any of the pictures he downloaded but despite the "juddering" low resolution "It was a picture of something that definitely wasn't man-made" and what with the slow connection, when he got cut off "I saw the guy's hand move across."

C'mon, this guy is an utter joke, none of the above is plausible. If any of these claims were anywhere near true then he is a script kiddy at best. Mentally unstable more like.

See, some crazy Russian murdered another Russian spy in London with some nasty radioactive poison. Pretty serious right?

Yep, a hell of a lot more serious than some gangster boss living in the UK is when a foreign government sanctions the use of radioactive materials on foreign soil. This is no mere assassination. What if the UK dropped a dirty bomb to the home address of the prime suspect in Russia ? That would be an act of war, wouldn't it ?

Lol.

[msimm]

I can see from your member number how you would have missed that discussion. I think everyone finally got tired of pointing it out. The editors and much of the newer members fit, lets say, a wider interpretation of the profile you might expect. Slashdot has gotten big. It's still fun, but don't expect it to be too rootsy. More like techsploitation. Like The Register, only without the witty write-ups but much funnier comments (trolls, idiots as well as the good ones).

Still, usually a good laugh to be found.

Re:Tit for tat

[bky1701]

I may not be him, but theres a lot of info here: http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/usa-summary-eng [amnesty.org]

Re:Tit for tat

[thej1nx]

Will this one do or do I get modded/called a troll for posting a fact?

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/05/19/usdom13418. htm [hrw.org]

Reality is not what Bush preaches from his pulpit.

I assume that now you or someone else will post a large list of countries that have worse records?

Fine. But none of those are taking a holier-than-thou approach for excuses of invading other countries, are they?

Re:aliens are for real

[vidarh]

In poor countries, having children grow to adulthood is an insurance for your old age.

Industrialized countries all used to have similarly have high birthrates until life expectancy started increasing as better hygiene and medicine made an impact together with improved food availability, and particularly as infant mortality dropped.

However, birth rates in most sub-Saharan countries have now finally started falling, coinciding with growing urbanization, and steadily dropping infant mortality. In fact, in some countries the birth rate have dropped by 20-30 percent over the last couple of decades.

The particularly high birth rates over the last decades was similar to those found in Europe a century ago, just as the effects of reducing infant mortality was creating a huge gap because people were still reproducing according to the old patterns. Further reductions in infant mortality combined with education and improved availability of contraceptives was what closed that gap and brought European birthrates down over the following decades.

Re:Tit for tat

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK it's not that clear cut, the Russian constitution doesn't explicitly say no extradition at all under any circumstances, instead it states that there should be no extradition for certain crimes or certain circumstances and the reason the British government has pushed it is because it's questionable whether or not Lugovoi is protected by these set of circumstances due to the fact it's such an unusual case.

There are also some contradictions in that Russia is signed up to the EU extradition treaty which agrees that signatories should extradite however at the same time there are clauses stating that they don't have to which muddies the waters somewhat.

On a final note it's worth pointing out that some countries constitutions are more guidelines and not taken as gospel as in the US meaning that the constitution doesn't always necessarily trump the decision of the courts/president/whoever. In fact recently Germany has been close to extraditing citizens to the US however the reason it didn't happen was not as a result of the constitution but because of the whole Guantanamo Bay no fair trial farce. Had the US legal system been shown to be fair and just this last few years Germany would've undoubtedly extradited at least some of these suspects against their constitution.

Re:Plea bargain

[stiggle]

In England and Wales (Scotland has a separate legal system) the Courts "take into consideration" such things as pleading guilty and admitting to additional offenses they have committed.

Its definately not illegal.

Re:Rights?

[spiderbitendeath]

"nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constit ution [wikipedia.org]

That person was very wrong. The 14th amendment states that they have to apply equal protection to any person, it does not specify they have to be a citizen.

Re:Plea bargain

[Anonymous Coward]

"do prosecuters in the US get a "job rating" based on some measure of "success"?

Yes. ADAs and DAs are considered successful and more likely to get pay raises/judgeships/political appointments with a high conviction rate for high profile crimes.