UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon Admits Guilt to Avoid Extradition

Would you admit to something you didn’t do to get the heavies off your back?

RIAA victims do it all the time. But now British hacker Gary McKinnon, who last year briefly won a stay of execution, so to speak, over his extradition to the US, has done exactly that avoid being forcibly exported to America as what amounts to a scapegoat for US security system failings.

“The Crown Prosecution Service is considering a request from McKinnon’s lawyers in which they have said their client would plead guilty to an offence under the Misuse of Computers Act,” says The Guardian.

“If McKinnon were to be prosecuted and punished in Britain, it would make any extradition to the US unlikely. McKinnon, 42, who has Asperger’s syndrome, has resisted attempts to extradite him to the US on the grounds that the offence was committed in the UK.”

Can people be extradited from the US to Britain? If not, why not?

The US called McKinnon “the world’s most dangerous hacker” after he penetrated almost 100 US military systems from his bedroom in North London, “crashing the US Army’s Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours,” as Times Online once described it.

He lost his House of Lords appeal against the extradition last month, but appealed to the European court of human rights, which granted the extension.

McKinnon said he’d surfed into the American military computers because he was looking for evidence of a UFO cover-up.

But he wasn’t caught because of sterling work by American security experts.

He’d left his real email address.

“Mr McKinnon who was born in Glasgow but lives in London, faces up to 70 years in prison if found guilty in the US of breaking into military computers,” says the BBC, adding:

“His lawyer Karen Todner said he still denies causing damage, which the US authorities put at $800,000 dollars (£532,500), but signed a statement offering to plead guilty to a different charge under the Misuse of Computers Act in a bid to remain in the UK.” Stay tuned.

UFO Hacker Gary McKinnon Admits Guilt to Avoid Extradition
____________________________________________________

Would you like to comment and discuss this posting? Go to Phantoms and Monsters Wiki and become a member of this unique network. Start a page on this subject or add your input to an existing page. We also send updates at Twitter