UK Hacker Gary McKinnon is
set for extradition to the United States, after a last-resort appellate
committee at the UK’s House of Lords denied his attempts to appeal Wednesday.
He is now taking his case to the European Court on Human Rights in Strasbourg,
France.
McKinnon is wanted in the United States for allegedly
hacking into Pentagon and military computers between 2001 and 2002, where
it is claimed he was searching for evidence of a UFO cover-up by the U.S.
government. As a byproduct of his escapades, U.S. authorities accuse
McKinnon of tampering with military log files – some of which were used to
assess the battle readiness of U.S. Navy ships – and deleting critical
information which, in one case, knocked more than 2000 U.S. Army computers
offline in Washington, DC.
In one case, McKinnon even left authorities a calling card in the form of a
note, which read:
“US foreign policy is akin to
government-sponsored terrorism these days ... It was not a mistake that there
was a huge security stand down on September 11 last year ... I am SOLO. I will
continue to disrupt at the highest levels...”
The Law
Lords’ opinion of USA v. McKinnon notes that McKinnon “admitted
responsibility” to his crimes with UK authorities after his arrest in 2002, and
evidence mounting against him across the pond indicates that he has little
chance of walking away with a not-guilty plea in the United States. To that
end, U.S. authorities offered McKinnon a plea deal: if McKinnon plead guilty
and came to the United States willingly, he’d endure a lenient, 6-12 month
sentence at a minimum security prison in the U.S., followed by repatriation to
the UK and most likely supervised or paroled release.
McKinnon has repeatedly turned down this offer, however, and instead spent
the last six years fighting the U.S. government’s extradition request. The
sentence he now faces is decidedly more severe: at least 8-10 years in a
medium- or high-security U.S. prison, and have little opportunity for parole or
repatriation to the UK.
In his defense, McKinnon said the U.S. plea-bargaining process – a technique
foreign to UK courts – was a violation of his human rights: the only way to
seek punishment in his own country, he argued, was to give in to the U.S.
plea-bargain and surrender willingly – a process that would have him
automatically admitting guilt and, according to his supporters, opting out of a
fair trial.
McKinnon’s defense has also expressed fears of special-category,
Guantanamo-style military treatment, should he be extradited to the United
States.
His supporters note that the Law Lords’ opinion, agreed on unanimously by
the court, was written by ex-Intelligence Services Commissioner Lord Brown of
Eaton-under-Haywood, automatically slanting his opinion in favor a cultural
“partnership” mentality with the U.S.
