Off with his head! It’s criminal
09 September 2008
Justice is meted out differently today, but as crimes cross international borders, will countries have to rethink crime and punishment?
Whether you think he is an international terrorist or a bit of naive geek, Gary McKinnon is a bit like marmite, people either love him or hate him. McKinnon is the man who hacked into US government computer systems and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002. So you can guess that Americans generally don’t like him. The country was still raw from the Al Quaeda attacks in New York and the Pentagon in 2001.
He is accused of hacking into dozens of US Army, Navy, Air Force and Department of Defense computers and 16 NASA computers, altering and deleting files at a US Naval Air Station, rendering critical systems inoperable and taking down a network of 2,000 US Army computers.
He says it was only to uncover critical information he believes the US Government is with-holding about unidentified flying objects and the secrets of an anti-gravity propulsion system recovered from alien spacecraft and reverse engineered by the military. He felt it was his mission, from his base in north London, to uncover the extra-terrestrial technology and to put it to good use.
Oddly enough, he is not pleading insanity.
He describes himself as a bumbling computer nerd. Nerd or not, he did manage to use commercially available software to hack into military and government networks as many machines did not have adequate password or firewall protection.
Americans don’t find this eccentric oddball amusing and want him extradited to face trial in the US. That could mean up to 70 years in prison for the 42-year old and millions of pounds in fines. Is it the case of the US government being so mad at its shortfalls being made public that it wants someone to pay?
Instead of vengenace, another approach could be to give the bloke a job. The FBI did it 50 years ago when they employed Frank Abagnale Jr. They caught the 19-year old who posed as a Pan Am pilot, even signing on the payroll and had also posed as a doctor and lawyer. The agency realised that if it was going to catch criminals it needed one of the best criminal minds in the business. Plus it is always better to have someone like him on your side instead of against you!
At least Abagnale confined his antics to the USA, McKinnon’s actions went across borders and could have had far-reaching consequences, and I don’t mean that the little green men he was trying to liberate would run amuck across the globe.
This time, America is mighty mad and has come down hard on him. In the 1990s, another British joker/hacker/maverick/conspiracy theorist hacked into the US military computer systems. He was prosecuted in the UK, although the case was dropped after 18 months when the prosecution decided not to proceed with the case. Mathew Bevan says he is now an ‘ethical hacker’, seemingly oblivious to the oxymoron, and is also a security consultant. He expresses surprise that lessons have not been learnt in the 10 years since he was caught and asks why Windows PCs on military networks are connected to the internet via direct IPs.
The same border-blurring scenario happened with the so-called NatWest Three, the bank’s capital arm employees that were jailed in Texas for fraudulent deals at Enron. Although the loser was NatWest, the three were tried in Texas as it was argued that the men played a part in financial fraud that sank Enron, a US company.
I can understand how boundaries for crime can change, the web crushes all international boundaries and people can act illegally in one country with implications in another because of the way the economy is truly global now. But how to decide which country’s law should come into play and who should be judge and jury. Today, it goes beyond all the bounds of citizenship and whether someone is a foreign national. It even goes beyond, where the crime took place.
My gran was right, it is a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive – I don’t think she could have foreseen what it would be like now, though.
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