Asperger’s Added to British Hacker’s Defense
The case of the British conspiracy buff who hacked his way onto the wrong side of American law at a particularly sensitive time would seem to have reached a crucial point.
After several legal twists and turns, Gary McKinnon seems to have run out of ways to avoid extradition to the United States, where a prosecutor accused him of “the biggest hack of military computers ever detected,” but his defense is beginning to emphasize the suspect’s recent diagnosis to influence the proceedings.
The European Court of Human Rights was asked to step in on the grounds that Mr. McKinnon faced the possibility of “inhuman or degrading treatment” if he ended up in an American prison. The request was denied today, ending his attempt to stop the extradition in court.
“The appeal is lost,” Karen Todner, a lawyer for Mr. McKinnon, said, according to Reuters. “He is completely distraught, all of them are, his family, his girlfriend.”
Ms. Todner said that he could be put on a flight to the United States within three weeks unless a British official decides to reverse his earlier refusal to intervene in the case. Since the first decision, Asperger’s syndrome, which is considered a form of autism, was diagnosed in Mr. McKinnon.
Long before the medical ruling, Mr. McKinnon and his lawyers have said that he meant no harm by hacking into nearly 100 United States government networks between 2001 and 2002. While prosecutors agree that he was simply searching for U.F.O.’s and other government secrets, they also said that Mr. McKinnon temporarily disabled crucial national security systems as the nation was wary of follow-up attacks to 9/11.
Those charges, which he denies, seem closer than ever to being presented in an American court. If the British government is not swayed by the Asperger’s diagnosis, an American judge may be.
Last month, a federal judge in the Pittsburgh area named Gustave Diamond refused to send a 20-year-old man convicted of building about two dozen pipe bombs to jail for any amount of time — let alone the prosecutor’s recommendation of 24 to 30 months. The chief reason? Asperger’s syndrome.
“I have no doubt that his makeup, in this case a definable disorder, led him to commit this crime,” he said, according to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “He’s never committed an act of violence of any kind, nor has he threatened an act of violence of any kind.”
McKinnon is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers over a 13-month period between February 2001 and March 2002, using the name 'Solo'. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force.
The US authorities claim he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinnon is also accused of copying data, account files and passwords onto his own computer. US authorities claim the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was over $700,000.
McKinnon has denied causing any damage, arguing that, in his quest for UFO-related material, he accessed open, unsecured machines with no passwords and no firewalls and that he left countless notes pointing out their many security failings. He disputes the damage and the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offence. While not admitting that it constituted evidence of destruction, McKinnon did admit leaving a threat on one computer:
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 …
US authorities claim that McKinnon is trying to downplay his own actions. A senior military officer at the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph: "US policy is to fight these attacks as strongly as possible. As a result of Mr McKinnon's actions, we suffered serious damage. This was not some harmless incident. He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and Nasa computers and left silly and anti-America messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems."
