Mayor Boris backs McKinnon in extradition fight Gary McKinnon has attracted the support of London Mayor Boris Johnson. In his weekly column in the Daily Telegraph, the Tory mayor calls upon President Barack Obama to ask US prosecutors to abandon efforts to extradite the British hacker, who faces a seven-count US indictment of allegations he broke into US military and Nasa …
Aspergers is not a defence against his activities, its a defence against being handed over to a system that can barely look after normal inmates in a decent way.
That said Boris makes his points well even he acts daft about somethings. Hope he's mayor still when Olympics is in town - chance he might tell it how it is then too.
"Why not just release all criminals and allow them to run free? Makes as much sense as what Obama is doing."
Indeed this is why we can't allow McKinnon to be tried in the USA, because there are still plenty of people like you and he could not expect a fair trial.
I agree with you 100%! But why not go all the way. Let's start chopping off hands and feet. Maybe a few blindings or castrations would do some good. And the odd auto-de-fe could whip up flaming support for our cause. Anything will do as long as it puts the hated criminal Aspie Unermentschen amongst us back into their place.
Just one thought though! I fear that posts like yours may give us ignorant, deluded, vindictive, cruel and primitive rednecks a bad name.
Oh shit. BoJo is making sense.
@RotaCyclic:
"The yanks claim McKinnon caused hundreds of thousands of pounds of damage, I suspect the cost is probably the cost of the military then deciding to implement proper security on their systems, which should have been there in the first place!"
Spot on. If memory serves, they say they had to shut down entire networks while plugging the holes (read: putting passwords), and the money they claim is mostly the cost of this maintenance.
For the love of God! The treaty *has* been ratified by Congress. Go over The Times archives and read the letter sent by the US Ambassador explaining this a couple of weeks ago after all the who-ha generated by their article on this subject. Then go back to journalism school and retake the "Researching your Facts" module.
Note: I'm not a US citizen, simply a British person who hates sloppy journalism.
Surely a 'hacker' who is freely allowed access to another computer, does no lasting harm isn't quite the "worst of the worst" in a criminal sense.
Perhaps a politician who takes people into a phoney war, kills thousands and spends trillions of dollars is just, maybe, perhaps, slightly worse....?
Oh, but that's right George W hasn't been charged yet, has he?
...the point is that McKinnon has *never* been under US Jurisdiction, ergo can't have committed a crime "in the US" (because he was on UK soil at the time), and at the time what he did wasn't actually explicitly illegal under UK law.
So a) the US are trying to extradite him to try him for a "crime" he didn't commit in the US and b) we now think that the next best option is to try him over here when it's debatable whether or not he commited a "crime" here either?
Forget Aspergers, this is law gone mad, in the same vein as the "tell us your encryption passwords or we'll jail you for 2 years" - "what encyrption passwords?" "SLAM".
That said, good work Boris.
As much as I dislike GordonB he's in a bit of a Catch-22 on this. If he doesn't send McKinnon over to the States then that proves (to the 'merkins) that McKinnon's actually an agent of the British State. If he does then it proves Gordon's a heartless bastard. Which of course, he is, so guess what he'll want to do?
"If he doesn't send McKinnon over to the States then that proves (to the 'merkins) that McKinnon's actually an agent of the British State"
It just proves that Gary is a harmless numpty (sorry Asperger's sydrome defenders) which is kind of obvious. Unless they have a really, really low opinion of the "British State". But that cannot be. It's not like they consider the UK as their faithful doggy-dog, is it?
Black copter, because it's a stealthy one and nobody can see it :-D
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