This Thanksgiving I am not thankful to hear that the Home Secretary of the UK has denied Gary McKinnon his further right of appeal against his extradition to the US. Not thankful at all.
I wanted to blog this ages ago, and I’m not sure why I never did. So this is going to be a mishmash of a post, trying to fit too much in at once. Sorry. But listen, people – the European court can still intervene, so this is the last chance to protest. I’m not sure what the best way is, at this point – the Mail on Sunday has been running a campaign with a petition – though fat lot of good that’s done. Emailing the Home Secretary may be no use at this stage. Twitter, blogs, Facebook. You could do like Chrissie Hynde and Dave Gilmour, and make a record.
Gary McKinnon, in case you’ve missed it over the past seven years, is a vegetarian pacifist UFO theorist from north London who hacked into the Pentagon’s computer systems, looking for signs of a conspiracy, from 1995 to 2002. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, which if you’ve missed that, is a form of high-functioning autism characterised by high intelligence, singlemindedness, and – er – skill with things like computers. The self-described “bumbling computer nerd” became obsessed with this idea that the Pentagon was hiding evidence of UFOs, and technological things to do with free energy. “It wasn’t just an interest in little green men and flying saucers,” McKinnon said. “I believe that there are spacecraft, or there have been craft, flying around that the public doesn’t know about.”
He would sit in his girlfriend Tamsin’s auntie’s living room in Crouch End, with a beer on one side and a spliff on the other, laptop on his lap, and access the US government systems via network administrators who had no login passwords.
Yeah, you got that. Administrators who had no login passwords. He was using a perfectly legal remote access and administration software called RemotelyAnywhere, which is used by schools, etc. As he put it in an interview, basically it was like logging in.
To the Pentagon. Because administrators had not set up passwords.
“From time to time, some Nasa scientist sitting at his desk somewhere would see his cursor move for no apparent reason” – wrote Jon Ronson in an interview with McKinnon in the Guardian in 2005. “On those occasions, Gary’s connection would be abruptly cut. This would never fail to freak out the then-stoned Gary.”
2005 is the critical year, because, although Gary was caught and questioned in 2002, they never applied for extradition until 2005. They questioned him and then let him go. They even left him with his computer. Why is that? Because 2005 is when Britain, alone in the world, signed a post-9/11 anti-terrorist treaty allowing the US to extradite any UK citizen, even without evidence. The treaty, eagerly signed by Tony Blair and his lapdogs, because Donald Rumsfeld wanted them to, apparently gives the UK no say in who gets extradited to the US under this legislation. Yes, the UK has apparently signed away its right to protect its citizens. And it was done without any consultation (of course) with UK voters.
I say apparently. But all the senior judges have ruled that the Home Secretary certainly does have the right to intervene. So he is choosing not to, and using this spurious piece of legislation as an excuse.
But get this, also from the interview with Ronson:
“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.
Elsewhere in the Guardian:
McKinnon’s search for UFO material on US computers turned into an obsession. As he investigated high-level computer systems in the US, his life in Britain fell apart. He lost his job and his girlfriend left him. Friends told him to stop hacking, but to no avail.
“I’d stopped washing at one point. I wasn’t looking after myself. I wasn’t eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night,” he said.
His behaviour showed all the characteristics associated with Asperger’s syndrome – an obsession with certain activities and interests and a level of “social naivety” in evaluating the consequences of one’s actions.
Prof Simon Baron-Cohen, who diagnosed McKinnon with the condition, has said: “We should be thinking about this as the activity of somebody with a disability rather than a criminal activity.”
Then there’s this, from Ronson’s interview…
“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.”
This was November 2000. By now, Gary was hooked. He quit his job as a systems administrator for a small business, “which hugely pissed off my girlfriend Tamsin. It was the last straw. She dumped me and started seeing this other bloke because I was such a selfish waste of space. Poor Tamsin. And she was the one paying the phone bill because I didn’t have a job. We were still living together. God, have you ever tried living with someone after you’ve split up? It’s bad.”
Clearly typical terrorist behaviour and a major international threat. Well, the interview with Ronson is funny, and I like it – because it is very human, and it shows clearly how daft this extradition is (and how very charming, and very London, Gary McKinnon is). Daft, but potentially tragic. The television interview at the top of this post gives the full flavour of the very serious elements of this case – one fear McKinnon has voiced is of being sent to Guantanamo. Being on the wrong side of gung-ho American anti-terrorism enthusiasts is no joke. And it also comes to something when a Labour government is to the right of the flipping Mail.
Other supporters of McKinnon, incidentally, include Sarah Brown, the Prime Minister’s wife.
Lord, this is getting long. I’d almost forgotten about Boris Johnson’s wonderful column in the Telegraph - which we should appreciate, as he gets £250K a year for writing them…
He may believe in little green men (writes our moptop Mayor), but he was not operating as a fifth columnist on behalf of these Venusians. He was not trying to cripple American defences in preparation for an assault from outer space. He was simply following up a weird intuition that UFOs exist, with all the compulsiveness that he has exhibited since he was a child.
In so doing, he has generously helped America to prepare against attack from a more sinister foe. If it was so ludicrously easy to penetrate these encryptions, then what could al-Qaeda have done? Just imagine if America’s defence establishment had commissioned IT consultants to probe their systems as exhaustively as Gary McKinnon. The contract would have been worth far more than £500,000.
McKinnon did it without charge, sitting up all the night, hardly eating, smoking heavily and spending so long tap-tapping in his dressing gown that his girlfriend gave up on him. The Americans shouldn’t be threatening him with jail. They should be offering him consultancy.
12 Comments
November 27, 2009 at 12:53 am
Great post. Appalling injustice. Off to share far and wide..
November 27, 2009 at 7:06 am
This is a case I have been following as well.
I also got hooked on what McKinnon was doing. Not so much the UFO’s and dope smoking, but sitting at a computer and obssessively working on a ‘routine’ of searching out evidence of poems in English being any good – with all the nerdy 24/7 shifts of Gaz himself.
Instead of UFO’s, it was poetry I sought, in all its myriad form, from a toddler ga ga gurgling attempt at repeating the sounds, to the lapidary strokes of the ‘excellent’ chiselled in lapidary splendour, wherever the site of Excellence and the poem appears.
~
I think Gaz will became a big star out of this. He already is.
I think the Auspergers is vastly overplayed. They have to present this for a ‘human rights’ defence, by presenting him disabled. But he is not at all disabled, in any real sense which deprives him of having a fairly normal life. He drinks, smokes, goes the pub, has (or did have) a girlfriend, and knowing Crouch End myself, can well imagine he isn’t going short of female attention. If Pete Doherty can pull Kate Moss on the strength of his act, Gaz is probably already got a cult forming round him, and there will be women who’d fancy him just because he is a star in Crouch End. It is not impossible the female fan-base following him, out of them, there will be a few who’d meet him in an excited state and fancy him, because they’ve heard he’s this and that and everything else, and when they met him, just melt into his mind as we realise Gaz is just a top geezer who was doing nothing wrong. But for some reason, the Military want him. Hmm.
He makes music that is actually pretty good and if we see his music vidz first, knowing nothing of him, we see it is not McKinnon who is disabled, but us as the one’s who need to explain away his seemingly illogical beleifs about UFO’s, by boxing him off as ‘disabled’. Look at his animated video, please – go to youtube and see the chill-out lo-fi sounds he has out, 10,000 hits. Beats most poets vidz of themselves.
~
He needed an argument for his case, because when he committed the offence, the legislation in the Computer Misuse Act relating to his ‘offence’, meant he had committed a simple misdemeanour that drew a statuatory penalty of a few hundred quid, max, for what he did – at the time he did it.
A handful of very important people at the highest echelon of the American Industrial-Military complex, want him there. Why?
A big show trial, to make an example of him: not so much for any ‘damage’ he caused to the computers — which is what they want to prosecute him for, under the retrospective legislation, fixed at $700, 000. A figure of 5000 dollars a machine McKinnon counters, has been concocted out of thin air, when the lawyers framed a piece of retrospective legislation enacted for the sole purpose of getting Gary McKinnon over to America, legally.
They want him to know who he was messing with when he went into to find out something which, if true – well, you could see why. Not that this means McKinnon’s UFO theory is correct, merely that the behaviour thus far does seem like that of someone with something to be upset about. A secret uncovered, or just another day in paradise at humanity HQ?
ha ha ha
What puts people off is the ‘alien’ bit, because, imagine, a trial starts and all kinds of wierd stuff came out that changed our perception of what might be ‘really’ going on in the universe.
We can laugh and be scared of taking this seriously, no way and not even a remotely possible premise: but the fact is – we just don’t know if Gaz did stumbled onto summat that was true and there are non-human entities, already working at the top level with human beings in the military.
I spent last summer immersed in Conspiracy theories, until I ended up becoming a fan of Daivid Icke and lurker at Above Top Secret: coming across, amongst the ninety nine percent doolally drivel – one or two unexplainable res publica, public matters.
Crop circles, chem-trails, the alien bases in Vegas and all manner of highly suspect hoo ha which one must switch away from and try not to knot-up about intellectual, because it would drive one nuts, sussing out even .00000000001% of everything that might possible be going on ‘unknown’ by all but the SWO, for example.
There is all kinds of wierdness going on. What I didn’t like, however, and told Ronson this, is the way he got cheap digs in on this man. Nothing blunt of course, but a few sub-visible sneers in the language that made me think Ronson was a a bit too smug and a touch snobby towards Gary. But Ronson made his name doing this didn’t he, sneeking into Celebrities’ lives and making them look like twats. McKinnon I thought, perhaps there is something to what he is saying, perhaps not, but we have not heard the last of Gaz, and if and when he ends up in the dock: it could be bigger than OJ.
Who knows? Not me.
November 27, 2009 at 9:30 am
My liberal instincts mean I should side with the Twitterati – and, ye Gods, the Mail – on this one, but I don’t.
I don’t see why McKinnon shouldn’t be prosecuted for what he did. I recognise that his story is that he was looking for evidence of clean-fuel alien craft, but I don’t think his intentions are relevant.
An analogy: if I woke up during the night to find someone in my house, going through my personal possessions, I would want him charged, even if he was actually, genuinely, looking for evidence of alien spacecraft and didn’t intend any harm (in which case I’d think him mentally unstable as well as criminal). I also wouldn’t be won over by the knowledge that he was stoned at the time.
In fact, to make the analogy more accurate, the burglar would need to have broken into dozens of houses in my neighbourhood already, and said on at least one occasion to a disturbed householder, “I’m going to keep doing this.” (One of the undisputed facts of McKinnon’s case is that he left a message on one US govt computer saying, “I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels.”) It would also, perhaps, be suggested on his behalf that as the houses in question had left their back doors unlocked, they couldn’t really blame him for entering them.
I agree with Desmond that probably too much has been made of McKinnon’s Asperger’s. He had lived for 42 years without being suspected or diagnosed with it, until his lawyers thought to have him examined by an expert who diagnosed him with the condition. While I have no doubts about the integrity of the expert involved or suggest that the diagnosis was not the right one, I will observe that as a lawyer, I know that lawyers are adept at finding doctors who will tell them what they want to hear about a client. His Asperger’s is also of limited relevance unless people are suggesting that people with the condition (which as I understand it, is akin to being at the milder end of the autistic spectrum) have less criminal responsibility than the rest of us.
Katy, I think it’s slightly misleading to say that the US “questioned him and let him go” in 2002. He was arrested in March 2002 and in October, a New Jersey court issued a warrant for his arrest. At this time he was indicted on seven counts by a grand jury. The request for extradition came in 2004. (This timeline is helpful.) So it’s not quite right to suggest, if that was your intention, that the US were basically not interested in pursuing it until the extradition treaty came into force in 2005.
There are undoubtedly mitigating circumstances in the case, but that’s why the legal system has the flexibility that it does and why courts have the discretions that they do. It doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face justice at all for his crimes. To suggest, as you have not Katy but others have, that he shouldn’t be extradited because the US legal system can’t be trusted to deal with the matter fairly, is not good enough.
November 27, 2009 at 9:35 am
Thanks guys – John I admit being lazy with the timeline, it was late and I was coughing! And now must straggle back to work after four unpaid days off sick, so do leave your comments, but I may not look again till this evening…
November 27, 2009 at 10:00 am
I don’t understand the argument that he should be “tried here”.
If the alleged crime took place in another jurisdiction, that’s where the trial would take place. Like the NatWest 3.
I think Gary’s lawyers would have to show he’s not fit to plead. Having functioning Asbergers doesn’t, on the face of it, mean one is unable to understand or to give one’s lawyers instructions.
As for the Home Secretary’s discretion, I’d like to see Keith Vaz’s advice from leading counsel. I suppose we will with the inevitable judicial review. If the Americans are taking the piss with the Extradition Treaty – it will come out in the JR.
This case kind of reminds me of the two girls from Islington who got nailed in an African country for trafficking drugs.
Just because this country will give you the benefit of any excuse and you won’t get a sentence to worry about unless you are a serial killer, doesn’t mean you can expect the same abroad.
November 27, 2009 at 10:14 am
That’s OK Katy – I forgot a couple of things in my comment too (I was eating breakfast and trying to cope with a cute but noisy baby)!
McKinnon’s mother Janis Sharp said yesterday, “It’s a disgusting decision. Gary has been in a heightened state of terror for almost eight years.” That’s primarily because he’s been fighting his arrest and extradition for almost eight years. If he’d faced the music when the warrant was issued for his arrest in 2002, he might even have been home by now.
November 27, 2009 at 10:46 am
Hello Self.
(I’ve always wanted to say that.)
McKinnon claims your analogy is inapplicable to his case, John.
He contextualized his ‘remote entry’ five thousand miles away: as being not like the behaviour of a burglar breaking into a real person’s house only to be caught rifling through ‘personal’ – material – possessions (this is after all cyberspace): but as someone walking in through a laughably unlocked door to an Space where there’s no ‘personal’ possessions, res privita – no ‘real’ private entities in this remote, fictional and wholly electronic military realm – just being nosey, with no intention to steal or harm, but, you know, just to have a nose around and go. That’s it.
He didn’t actually do anything ‘in’ America, and where he did do it, it was only a 200 quid fine.
For him to be incarcerated for that, for breaking a law, sat at home on a computer, using retrospective legislation, McKinnon’s position is, this is out of all proportion to what he ‘did’ on his computer – whilst the powers that be five thousand miles way, disagree and why this is causing into a big scene is because people are thinking it is the thin end of the wedge, Britian is the 53rd state when Washington and not London decides how best to ‘punish’ a man sat at his screen, breaking a 100 quid law in the physical space he is in, England.
People think it is unfair and not on, especially with Blair having done far worse and being paid millions for it.
I think Britain is gearing up for a once in a generation change. I can feel it in the air over Gaz.
November 27, 2009 at 11:25 am
Dear Katy
I’ve lost all respect for Alan Johnson (the British home secretary) over this. Of course we need to keep the U.S. onside but this kind of shameless creeping is doing nobody any good. Last night we celebrated Thanksgiving with our American friends Les & Connie. They live in a huge house next to a chateau and a good time was had by all!
Best wishes from Simon
November 27, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Thanks Desmond – yes I see why McKinnon doesn’t accept the analogy, and I only meant it for illustrative purposes.
It’s worth pointing out also that McKinnon’s behaviour both on the computers and with the US authorities wasn’t always as Walter Mitty as is now being suggested. In Jon Ronson’s report in August 2009, we’re told that when entering US computers, McKinnon would leave
I’d like to see the content of the ‘political diatribe’ and know whether that influenced the US authorities to seek extradition under anti-terrotist legislation. According to one report, one such message, left on a machine at US Naval Weapons Station Earle (which is responsible for replenishing munitions and supplies for the Atlantic Fleet), said:
There is also something slightly disingenuous about his response here:
The idea of someone sufficiently computer-literate to be able to get into Pentagon computers – even non-password-protected ones – ‘inadvertently press[ing] the wrong button and delet[ing] some files’, smells a bit fishy to me.
He was also told by the US authorities that if he pleaded guilty and co-operated, he should get 18 months to 3 years in prison. He rejected the offer apparently on the grounds that it wasn’t in writing! Again, from my legal experience, the idea of a plea bargain being put in writing is fanciful: sentencing indications are never hard and fast but are usually pretty close to the end result.
Instead, he chose to threaten them:
All in all, I suspect there is more to McKinnon’s activities than we are being told by his supporters.
November 27, 2009 at 9:28 pm
And here is an article which I think is valuable, as it gives the background to the extradition treaty and explains the facts behind some of the rhetoric applied to it.
November 27, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Here’s what does make me laugh – all the apologists for the treaty saying that the Government’s hands were tied due to the US Constitution.
Newsflash – if they have a higher standard, the US Constitution does not stop the UK from matching that standard.
Please, please do not talk to me about “generational change” in this country. Cameron is no Obama. At the end of the day, I’ve got £20.00 at Messrs William Hill that Labour will win the next general election. Why? Because there is nothing to “change” to.
November 27, 2009 at 10:11 pm
and BTW, “bigger than OJ” my arse.
Black americans “cared” about OJ because somehow that trial got made into the “white” establishment v “the black man” rather than boring old domestic violence. yawn.
“Gaz” is an unfortunate – with an unfortunate “non-addictive” weed habit who lives with his mum and hacks computers from the basement. Call me crazy, but I don’t see the sympathy he has is going to make a blind bit of difference.