Accused Hacker Gets Appeal To Law Lords

The Law Lords are a committee of the House of Lords in the UK, and they function as the court of last appeal there.

They have accepted the appeal of Gary McKinnon, the blithering idiot who broke into Pentagon computers looking for UFOs.

While I have little affection for McKinnon, who, the law under which he is to be extradited is a farce. It requires no showing of proof, and no guarantees of due process, so he could be sent directly to Gitmo.

The law Lords agreed to hear arguments that US authorities acted in an "oppressive" and "arbitrary" manner during plea bargaining negotiations, for example by allegedly threatening McKinnon over the loss of rights to serve part of his sentence in the UK unless he submitted to voluntary extradition.

This is the problem with this US-UK agreement. It's being misused.

It's intended for terrorists, but its first use was for a group of bankers engaging in white collar crime, and now it's being used to attempt a plea bargain.

This is why you have limits prosecutorial power.

That being said, one thing is certain, McKinnon is not the biggest idiot involved in all of this:

The 41-year-old has said he gained access to military networks - using a Perl script to search for default passwords - but describes himself as a bumbling amateur motivated by curiosity about evidence of UFOs rather than a cyberterrorist.

The people, hopefully now unemployed, who did not change their default passwords probably need help cutting their steak.