UFO Hacker Loses Extradition Fight

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Well it looks like the now infamous UFO hacker will be extradited to the United States to stand trial for hacking into the Department of Defense and NASA computers.

McKinnon had applied to the European Court of Human Rights for it to hear an appeal against his extradition. Under Rule 39, citizens can make an emergency application to halt extradition proceedings, if they believe that their human rights will be infringed upon. McKinnon's legal team on Thursday sent out a statement saying his application had been denied.
 
Good. Just because you live in another country doesn't mean you are immune from consequence if you cause problems in another country.
 
I'm pretty shocked at this, because he did not cause any damage to the systems he compromised nor did he intend too. He also used very basic method to crack the passwords of the systems he compromised this was because the systems were not very secure at all.

I don't think he should have to be tried in the US as he will most likely end up spending along time in prison when it is the US governments fault that the systems were not secure.
 
I'm pretty shocked at this, because he did not cause any damage to the systems he compromised nor did he intend too. He also used very basic method to crack the passwords of the systems he compromised this was because the systems were not very secure at all.

I don't think he should have to be tried in the US as he will most likely end up spending along time in prison when it is the US governments fault that the systems were not secure.

Yes if someone has a simple lock on their front door its a-ok to just pop it and go roaming around and play with their stuff because they didn't have a better lock.
 
Yes if someone has a simple lock on their front door its a-ok to just pop it and go roaming around and play with their stuff because they didn't have a better lock.

Its ok if the owner of the house is American, because Americans are oppressive fascists.
 
Yes if someone has a simple lock on their front door its a-ok to just pop it and go roaming around and play with their stuff because they didn't have a better lock.


LOL!!!

People that say "no damage" obviously didn’t factor in the cost of paying IT experts to come in and inspect, fix or re-do every system that guy broke into. These are NASA / DoD computers, not e-machines.

Using your lock analogy, the cost of replacing every single lock on your house because some scumbag broke in can add up quick.


My big problem with this shitbag is all the crap he talked about the U.S. in all them interviews "f*ck them" "they can't do shit to me" etc. etc. etc. Now he is crying the blues.

Those of us covering this story since the beginning know there was no "secrets to free energy" BS that he is claiming now. He should have the balls to face up to what he did, claiming he is going to be "tortured" by the US is retarded too.
 
I'm pretty shocked at this, because he did not cause any damage to the systems he compromised nor did he intend too. He also used very basic method to crack the passwords of the systems he compromised this was because the systems were not very secure at all.

I don't think he should have to be tried in the US as he will most likely end up spending along time in prison when it is the US governments fault that the systems were not secure.

lol

Your kidding right?
 
:rolleyes:Not facing the death penalty, over 18, and Asperger syndrome seems not enough to consider him legally incompetent. I really did not think that he would win his extradition fight.

Its ok if the owner of the house is American, because Americans are oppressive fascists.

:rolleyes: So young, so stupid, damn the news on BBC.
 
I can't believe anyone took my comment seriously. How sad is that?

I don't know. I guess I'm so use to hearing crap like that on the internet waaaaay to much from people who mean srs bizness.

In retrospect, it's pretty funny.
 
I don't know. I guess I'm so use to hearing crap like that on the internet waaaaay to much from people who mean srs bizness.

In retrospect, it's pretty funny.

Yeah I know. Ever goto Digg? Its like an American bashing haven. The war in Georgia, Americas fault. Starvation in "nothing ever grows here Ethiopa" Americas fault. Global warming, food prices, oil prices, all of it, Americas fault.

In the US, the stupid and those without personal responsibility blame other people for their problems. In the rest of the world, they blame the US for their problems. Both actions are stupid.
 
Yeah I know. Ever goto Digg? Its like an American bashing haven. The war in Georgia, Americas fault. Starvation in "nothing ever grows here Ethiopa" Americas fault. Global warming, food prices, oil prices, all of it, Americas fault.

In the US, the stupid and those without personal responsibility blame other people for their problems. In the rest of the world, they blame the US for their problems. Both actions are stupid.

Yeah digg, youtube and anywhere else that is populated online by a world audience is bad. I also didn't see your first comment so I fail. :eek:
 
:rolleyes:Not facing the death penalty, over 18, and Asperger syndrome seems not enough to consider him legally incompetent. I really did not think that he would win his extradition fight.
Oh good gawd, not another Aspie trying to use that as an excuse. :rolleyes: Seems like being an Aspie is the excuse du jour. :mad:
 
Oh good gawd, not another Aspie trying to use that as an excuse. :rolleyes: Seems like being an Aspie is the excuse du jour. :mad:

Aspie = I dont like developing my social skills because they are hard and often uncomfortable, therefore I shall choose not too, blame it on a disease, and get away with acting like a dipshit.

Back in the day, an "Aspie" would just get smacked up side the head until they acted right. Unlike some more serious issues, its hardly uncurable.
 
Yes if someone has a simple lock on their front door its a-ok to just pop it and go roaming around and play with their stuff because they didn't have a better lock.

It's a great analogy. So good that i think the punishment should be pretty similar. How much jail time would you get for breaking into somebody house and looking around?
 
It's a great analogy. So good that i think the punishment should be pretty similar. How much jail time would you get for breaking into a US Federal Government/military installation and looking around?

Fixed for you
 
It's a great analogy. So good that i think the punishment should be pretty similar. How much jail time would you get for breaking into somebody house and looking around?

There's too many variables like amount of force and if it the plaintiff intended/performed larceny.

Still, any American judge is going to go Rambo on his ass. :D
 
It's a great analogy. So good that i think the punishment should be pretty similar. How much jail time would you get for breaking into somebody house and looking around?

If it was not a federal installation (which it was) and he was just convicted of just one count of B&E (and not other offenses at the time) his minimum sentencing guideline would be level 20 which carries a federal sentencing guideline of 33-41 months in federal prison if the individual has no previous criminal records and cooperates. This case would hardly fall under the normal guidance given he has not cooperated.
 
Oh good gawd, not another Aspie trying to use that as an excuse. :rolleyes: Seems like being an Aspie is the excuse du jour. :mad:

I was not alluding that Asperger was a legit excuse. I have actually been following it somewhat. It seemed like just another attempt at not doing time a while back when they first brought it up.



Monkey God: Oooops, sorry, did not catch the sarcasm. I would have if I realized you were one of the earlier posters. I tend not to look at who actually made a particular post unless it is a particularly smart or stupid one.
 
I was not alluding that Asperger was a legit excuse. I have actually been following it somewhat. It seemed like just another attempt at not doing time a while back when they first brought it up.
Sure I understand. This idiot McKinnon has been trying every excuse in the book to avoid extradition. :rolleyes:
 
If it was not a federal installation (which it was) and he was just convicted of B&E (and not other offenses at the time) his minimum sentencing guideline would be level 20 which carries a federal sentencing guideline of 33-41 months in federal prison if the individual has no previous criminal records and cooperates. This case would hardly fall under the normal guidance given he has not cooperated.
I think in his case we should OUTSOURCE the punishment. Ship him over to Malaysia and let them give him 20 strokes with a cane. World Corporal Punishment Research has several videos of actual canings.
 
I think the fact that these government departments don't enforce a more secure password policy is quite worrying, although most people who have worked in IT for a large corporation would of seen very similar things.

It's the law of numbers I suppose... with enough people you'll almost certainly come across a few who think trying to remember an 8 character password that changes every 90 days is impossible.

With US state secrets only a 'P@55word' away, it was only a matter of time before this happened - and lets face it, it could of been far, far worse.
 
I bolded the important part....

Game over
Gary McKinnon has been accused of committing the 'biggest military computer hack of all time', and if extradited to the US faces up to 70 years in jail. So how did this techno geek from north London end up cracking open the Pentagon and Nasa's systems? He talks exclusively to Jon Ronson as he awaits his fate

* The Guardian,
* Saturday July 9 2005
* Article history

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday July 23 2005

In the following article we incorrectly referred to a piece of software called RemotelyAnywhere as a hacking programme. The programme, made by 3am Labs, is designed for remote access and administration. It is used by thousands of enterprises worldwide. We apologise for the unintended misrepresentation.


In 1983, when Gary McKinnon was 17, he went to see the movie WarGames at his local cinema in Crouch End, north London. In WarGames, a geeky computer whiz kid hacks into a secret Pentagon network and, inadvertently, almost instigates world war three. Sitting in the cinema that day, the teenage Gary wondered if he, too, could be a hacker.

"Really," I say to him now, "WarGames should have put you off hacking for life."

"Well," he replies, "I didn't mean it to actually come true." WarGames ends with the Pentagon telling the young nerd how impressed they are by his technical acumen. He's probably going to grow up to have a brilliant career at Nasa or the department of defence. This is an unlikely scenario for Gary McKinnon. He currently faces 20 charges in the US, including stealing computer files, obtaining secrets that might have been "useful to an enemy", intentionally causing damage to a protected computer, and interfering with maritime navigation equipment in New Jersey. Last month he attended extradition proceedings at Bow Street magistrates court - he had, the American prosecutors said, perpetrated the "biggest military computer hack of all time". He "caused damage and impaired the integrity of information ... The US military district of Washington became inoperable and the cost of repairing the shutdown was $700,000 ... These [hacking attacks] occurred immediately after 9/11 ... " And so on.

This is Gary's first interview. He called me out of the blue on the Monday before last, just as I was screaming at my child to stop knocking on people's doors and running away. "Your son sounds like a hacker," he told me. Then he invited me to his house in Bounds Green, north London. He is good-looking, funny, slightly camp, nerdy, chain-smokes Benson & Hedges, and is terrified. "I'm walking down the road and I find I can't control my own legs," he says. "And I'm sitting up all night thinking about jail and about being arse-fucked. An American jail. And remember, according to them I was making Washington inoperable 'immediately after September 11'. I'm having all these visions of ... " Gary puts on a redneck prisoner voice, "'What you doing attacking our country, boy? Pick up that soap.' Yeah, it is absolutely fucking terrifying. Especially because a friend of mine was on holiday in America once and was viciously attacked and ended up killing the guy who attacked him - he did 10 years in an American prison. He's quite a tough guy, and he said he had to fight tooth and nail every single day, no let up at all. And I'm thinking, 'I'm only a little nerd'."

The prison sentence the US justice department is seeking - should Gary be successfully extradited - is up to 70 years. What Gary was hunting for, as he snooped around Nasa, and the Pentagon's network, was evidence of a UFO cover-up.

Gary McKinnon was born in Glasgow in 1966. His father ran a scaffolding gang, but his parents separated when he was six and he moved to London with his mother and stepfather, a bit of a UFO buff. "He comes from Falkirk," Gary says, "and just outside Falkirk there's a place called Bonnybridge, which is the UFO capital of the world. When he lived there, he had a dream that he was walking around Bonnybridge seeing huge ships. He told me this and it inflamed my curiosity. He was a great science fiction reader. So, him being my second father, I started reading science fiction, too, and doing everything he did."

Gary read Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein - "the golden age of science fiction" - and he joined Bufora, the British UFO Research Association, when he was 15. Bufora describes itself as "a nationwide network of around 300 people, who have a dedicated, noncultist interest in understanding the wide-ranging extent of the UFO enigma".

"So you began to believe in UFOs," I say.

"To hope," says Gary, "that there might be something more advanced than us, keeping a friendly eye on us. Hopefully a friendly eye." Then he saw WarGames, and he thought, "Can you really do it? Can you really gain unauthorised access to incredibly interesting places? Surely it can't be that easy." And so, in 1995, he gave it a try.

He sat in his girlfriend Tamsin's aunt's house in Crouch End, and he began to hack. He downloaded a program that searched for computers that used the Windows operating system, scanned addresses and pinpointed administrator user names that had no passwords. Basically, what Gary was looking for - and found time and again - were network administrators within high levels of the US government and military establishments who hadn't bothered to give themselves passwords. That's how he got in.

His Bufora friends "were living in cloud cuckoo land", he says. "All those conspiracy theorists seemed more concerned with believing it than proving it." He wanted evidence. He did a few trial runs, successfully hacking into Oxford University's network, for example, and he found the whole business "incredibly exciting. And then it got more exciting when I started going to places where I really shouldn't be".

"Like where?" I ask.

"The US Space Command," he says.

And so, for the next seven years, on and off, Gary sat in his girlfriend's aunt's house, a joint in the ashtray and a can of Foster's next to the mouse pad, and he snooped. From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason. On those occasions, Gary's connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.

He sounds to me like a virtuoso hacker, although I am someone who can barely download RealPlayer. I nod blankly as he says things like, "You get on to easy networks, like Support and Logistics, in order to exploit the trust relationship that military departments have between each other, and once you get on to an easy thing, you find out what networks they trust and then you hop and hop and hop, and eventually you think, 'That looks a bit more secretive.' " When I ask if he is brilliant, he says no. He's just an ordinary self-taught techie. And, he says, he was never alone.

"Once you're on the network, you can do a command called NetStat - Network Status - and it lists all the connections to that machine. There were hackers from Denmark, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Thailand ..."

"All on at once?" I ask. "You could see hackers from all over the world, snooping around, without the spaceniks or the military realising?"

"Every night," he says, "for the entire five to seven years I was doing this."

"Do you think they're still there? Are they still at it? Or have they been arrested, too?"

Gary says he doesn't know.

"What was the most exciting thing you saw?" I ask.

"I found a list of officers' names," he claims, "under the heading 'Non-Terrestrial Officers'."

"Non-Terrestrial Officers?" I say.

"Yeah, I looked it up," says Gary, "and it's nowhere. It doesn't mean little green men. What I think it means is not earth-based. I found a list of 'fleet-to-fleet transfers', and a list of ship names. I looked them up. They weren't US navy ships. What I saw made me believe they have some kind of spaceship, off-planet."

"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.

"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."

"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"

"I guess so," says Gary.

"What were the ship names?"

"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."

What a retard.:rolleyes:
 
I think it comes down to - when you're on a computer, and you connect to another computer over the internet that's in a different country, who's jurisdiction are you under? The country your computer is in, or the country of the computer you are connecting to?

Apparently we believe it should be the country of the computer you connect to (which is why he's being extradited to here instead of going to a UK court where his computer was). Which sounds wrong because the very same people would say if you connected to a Russian or Chinese server and downloaded copyrighted works you're still breaking the law even though it's not illegal in the country where the computer you connected to is located. So, which is it? Do you judge a person based on the laws of the country they are in, or the laws of the country they connect to over the internet? Personally from what I've always thought our courts would still consider it illegal even if the same copyright laws didn't exist in the country of the computer you connect to, they would tell you "You're subject to the laws of the country you're physically in, doesn't matter if it's legal over there and you're connecting to there over the internet", so the same reasoning goes that he would be subject to UK laws in this case.
 
Does the guy think they are going to send him to Gitmo?

Hey... Thats actually not a bad idea :)

And to the @#$^$&$%^*$^* who wrote and distributed the last round of vLob Rogue's, Gitmo would be too good for you. You should be grabbed by the neck and thrown deep into the firey pits of hell. Without water.
 
I think it comes down to - when you're on a computer, and you connect to another computer over the internet that's in a different country, who's jurisdiction are you under? The country your computer is in, or the country of the computer you are connecting to?

Apparently we believe it should be the country of the computer you connect to (which is why he's being extradited to here instead of going to a UK court where his computer was). Which sounds wrong because the very same people would say if you connected to a Russian or Chinese server and downloaded copyrighted works you're still breaking the law even though it's not illegal in the country where the computer you connected to is located. So, which is it? Do you judge a person based on the laws of the country they are in, or the laws of the country they connect to over the internet? Personally from what I've always thought our courts would still consider it illegal even if the same copyright laws didn't exist in the country of the computer you connect to, they would tell you "You're subject to the laws of the country you're physically in, doesn't matter if it's legal over there and you're connecting to there over the internet", so the same reasoning goes that he would be subject to UK laws in this case.

I would think it is probably both jurisdictions in this case but the actual intrusion in this case occurred in US jurisdiction so I would guess due to treaty reasons the US would have claim to trying him no matter the British statutes.
 
I think it comes down to - when you're on a computer, and you connect to another computer over the internet that's in a different country, who's jurisdiction are you under? The country your computer is in, or the country of the computer you are connecting to?

Thats actually an easy question. You are under the jurisdiction of the country you are IN. However, countries have extradition treaties, and if the victim country can convince the host country that a crime has been comitted, and an extradition treaty exists, off you go...
 
I think it comes down to - when you're on a computer, and you connect to another computer over the internet that's in a different country, who's jurisdiction are you under? The country your computer is in, or the country of the computer you are connecting to?

Apparently we believe it should be the country of the computer you connect to (which is why he's being extradited to here instead of going to a UK court where his computer was). Which sounds wrong because the very same people would say if you connected to a Russian or Chinese server and downloaded copyrighted works you're still breaking the law even though it's not illegal in the country where the computer you connected to is located. So, which is it? Do you judge a person based on the laws of the country they are in, or the laws of the country they connect to over the internet? Personally from what I've always thought our courts would still consider it illegal even if the same copyright laws didn't exist in the country of the computer you connect to, they would tell you "You're subject to the laws of the country you're physically in, doesn't matter if it's legal over there and you're connecting to there over the internet", so the same reasoning goes that he would be subject to UK laws in this case.

I have not been in or heard of any country which says it's legal to break into any government system, whether their own or someone elses.

Stealing music or copy righted software is much diffrent than breaking into a system that's deemed a national security issue.
 
Thats actually an easy question. You are under the jurisdiction of the country you are IN. However, countries have extradition treaties, and if the victim country can convince the host country that a crime has been comitted, and an extradition treaty exists, off you go...


Not to mention, both countries may work together to get you the highest sentence. So where locally you get a low sentence, they would rather want a extradition to another country where they can lock you up for much longer.
 
It's a great analogy. So good that i think the punishment should be pretty similar. How much jail time would you get for breaking into somebody house and looking around?

Interesting question.....since I'm from the US, in some of our states where the castle doctrine is in full force, your answer could be death.......extreme? Yes, legal, depends on the state......

Normally as previously mentioned it would be a B&E count, not "that" big a deal, but not something I'd want on my record. I guess it depends on who's house you break into that determines the punishment........in this case......breaking into a federal US "house" regardless of weak security or not, has landed him with 20 huge rottweilers on his ass......sucks......but if you want to hack because you can, be prepared to pay because you could........

He has the fact that he did corrupt anything will be a huge plus, I'm betting he could plea it down to a fine for all the IT time to survey and fix and go back home......with the right lawyer of course.
 
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