Gary McKinnon.

[Combwork]

Between 2001 and 2002, a 34 year old man born in Scotland but now living in England managed to hack into 97 NASA and Pentagon computers. He has Asperger's syndrome (a mild form of autism, characterised by linier thinking and little or no awareness of anything outside his own world) and was looking for information about UFOs, which he thought was hidden in secret US government files. He found nothing, and left messages pointing out that their computer security "was useless".

Incredibly, the US authorities want to extradite him and try him under US laws for the 'crime' of computer terrorism and even more incredibly, despite scoring 43 out of 50 points on tests designed to recognize Asperger's/Autism, so far our weak kneed lily livered government has gone along with it.

Two reasons for not allowing this to happen:

1). The extradition treaty between the U.S.A. and the U.K. is unbalanced;
to extradite from the U.S.A. to the U.K. requires very strong evidence to
'prove' the suspect is guilty before letting them be extradited; to go the
other way the US government only needs to show reasonable grounds to suspect that the
individual concerned has committed a crime.
2). All he seems guilty of is causing whoever set up the security systems of
the hacked computers 'extreme embarrassment'.

So, should this guy be sent to the U.S.A. to face charges of computer terrorism? If found guilty (which having admitted to what he's done he probably will be) he could face up to 50 years in prison; chances of survival of someone with Asperger's syndrome are slim to zero, or should he be given a medal for showing how crap the computers security systems were. Remember, this guy used home computers and was self taught. If this classic 'nerd' could do what he did and leave messages saying he'd been there, how far into the system could a genuine computer terrorist get without being detected?

Is it just me, or is the US government guilty of slamming the stable door so long after the horse has bolted that it's probably died of old age?