NASA Hacker Wins Right to Extradition Hearing 217
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."
question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tit for tat (Score:4, Insightful)
Ergo, he represents absolutely ZERO threat to the security of any group (unless of course you guys actually DO have those UFOs hidden
So basically he's being punished because he embarrased a US institution that should know better about computer security.
Secondly, we here in the UK are in a bit of pickle and wish this would go away. See, some crazy Russian murdered another Russian spy in London with some nasty radioactive poison. Pretty serious right? But if we want him to stand trial and be extradited from Russia then we'd have to give them an equally unpleasant mafia boss who is hiding in London that Putin wants. Stalemate. Both countries are hiding behind the skirt of "We don't extradite people to countries where they would face danger or unfair trial"
Problem: The USA is a country that tortures prisoners and disappears people to secret prisons and we know this because the UN has condemned it as a human rights abuser. We have a serious crediblity problem if this guy goes to the USA.
I see a deal.
Let's say, we give this dangerous hacker to the USA and they promise he'll get a fair trial In return and we'll take George W Bush for the multiple war crimes he's indited with to the International Crimial Court at the Haugue (and promise he will get a fair trial) and let's call it quits huh?
Re:Plea bargain (Score:5, Insightful)
Except, is that legal in the UK?
I mean, yea, yeah, he's being tried in the US. But don't his rights as a UK citizen apply as well?
Don't you mean "Cracker" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Tit for tat (Score:1, Insightful)
we'll take George W Bush for the multiple war crimes he's indited with
Please cite your sources.
This guy sounds like a Skr1p7 k1dd13. (Score:1, Insightful)
The guy spent some time locating unsecured entry points to high profile sites and is then heralded by the clueless media rabble as some kind of "uberhacker", instead of the fool he really is.
It doesn't take skill to do the kind of thing his type did, just a lack of good sense. He probably thought nobody would ever notice...maybe he even left clues so that he would get noticed...
Re:question.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:aliens are for real (Score:5, Insightful)
I think, generally speaking, when you have a vast impoverished region, it has more to do with horribly corrupt governments, and not so much to do with having "like 30 children". From what I understand, families in highly impoverished areas with high mortality rates do tend to have a lot of children, with the hope that some of them will actually survive, and maybe even prosper, but I would suggest that's more an effect of poverty rather than a cause of it. The reason that average American doesn't have tons of children isn't because we're smarter than the rest of the world, it's because all of our children have a reasonably good chance at survival, and a good chance at a comfortable life. Their chances at success are made better if we only have a few children, so we can afford to pay for their education, but in a region like Darfur, having just 2 children and hoping for the best probably means none of your children will make it to adulthood...
Plea Bargain (Score:5, Insightful)
So the US basically said accept our plea or end up in prison for life. I think thats where the human rights issue also comes in.
One of the biggest problems with US law is the plea bargain system, thats why the laws are so horrible, it makes people want to bargain instead of going to court. Its not to punish people, its to keep everyone out of jury trials.
Hell, if everyone went to a trial for everything, could you imagine the crippling effect it would have on the courts? Everyone citizen would have to pull multiple jury trails to keep up with it.
Re:Tit for tat (Score:5, Insightful)
* 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.
As for the fourth item, I don't know why he didn't think to take a screenshot of his VNC window; That would have given him something to save. And I don't know what he was referring to by some guy's hand moving.
All in all, it sounds like he used a botnet to find a PC running unprotected VNC, and connected to it with compression turned way up, and color depth turned way down. At some point, some poor guy noticed his computer acting up on his own, and chatted with the cracker by opening up a text editor and taking turns typing. All of this is very plausible.
Poodle (Score:4, Insightful)
Birth control.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
And less prone to actually losing your budget. I have direct experience of a previous employer, where we were requesting a network kit upgrade for 5 years, and each year, it got dropped from the budget, because 'well, it seems OK'. We spent that long rebooting switches, and almost daily 'firefighting' to keep the rising tide away from our sandcastle.
And then one day, it all fell over, in a critical fashion. The usual recriminations vanished very quickly when we pulled out the 5 years of budget paperwork.
So, lets just imagine, that the SA there _knows_ security needs work. But as with all such things, it takes time and a serious effort to get a 'proper' secure system setup. I mean, you can't just turn off telnet on a few servers, and hope that's ok :).
And they get hacked. And it goes public. As said sysadmin, wouldn't you then take the opportuntity to implement that idea you've had for ages, to tighten up security, and make everything a little bit better, only this time you have managers practically forcing you to do what you wanted to do all along. Better yet, you can spend loads of moolah with impuginty, and pull it out of the 'emergency response' budget, and proceed to wave the 'ooh hacker' flag when anyone questions you over it.
Re:Plea bargain (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be difficult to put a citizen in jail and impossible to seek state sponsored revenge through executions, but to an outsider (like me) it sometimes appears to be a dutch auction where they start at "life or death" and work down until the guy in the orange suit cracks. Not trying to be offensive here but do prosecuters in the US get a "job rating" based on some measure of "success"?