Britain Declines To Prosecute Alleged NASA Hacker

After 10-year legal battle for allegedly hacking U.S. government computers in search of information on UFOs, British hacker Gary McKinnon is free.

The British government has declined to prosecute Gary McKinnon, 46, who had been accused of perpetrating the biggest military computer hack of all time. As a result, more than a decade after the alleged crimes occurred, McKinnon is now a free man.
I feel the 10 years have been grueling, its been life-destroying. Its difficult to explain how bad its been, McKinnons mother, Janis Sharp,
told
The Guardian
.
To have this over is amazing. Garys gone through enough, she said. Other people have been accused of more serious hacking in this country and theyve been given a 1,000-pound fine and a very short community sentence. Gary regrets what hes done. He wishes he hadnt done it. He wishes he hadnt upset the Americans. We all regret it. But Im grateful to Theresa May that this is all over now.
Sharp said McKinnons next step will be to seek a pardon from President Obama.
[ Operation Payback case highlights how U.S. and British hacker investigations differ. Read more at
How U.K. Police Busted Anonymous Suspect
. ]
McKinnon, whos been diagnosed with
Aspergers syndrome
and depression, was first arrested by U.K. police a decade ago for allegedly gaining unauthorized access to computers owned by the U.S. government, reportedly in search of evidence about UFOs. In 2004, the United States first sought his extradition, and in recent years, after McKinnon
lost multiple appeals
, it looked like hed finally be extradited.
In October, however, British home secretary Theresa May, citing medical reports that McKinnon would be a suicide risk if he was extradited, said that Britain would not honor the extradition request. May also said that it would be up to the director of public prosecutions (DPP) to determine if a case against the alleged hacker should proceed in England and Wales.
Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions for the Crown Prosecution Service, and Mark Rowley, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, in a joint statement released Friday, noted that it was unlikely that any prosecution of McKinnon in Britain would now succeed, especially because theres been no live investigation into his alleged crimes for many years. Notably, the U.S. Department of Justice, Metropolitan Police Service, and Crown Prosecution Service in 2002 jointly agreed that McKinnon should be tried not in Britain, but the United States, given that the required witnesses, and the vast majority of evidence, was located there.
None of the reasons for the original decision in 2002 that the appropriate place for Mr. McKinnon to be tried was the United States have altered, said Starmer and Rowley. So far as the evidence is concerned, the position in 2012 is the same as it was in 2002. Most of the witnesses are in the U.S., as is nearly all the physical evidence and the bulk of the unused material, some of which is sensitive.
Starmer and Rowley noted that the U.S. Department of Justice said it would cooperate with any U.K. investigation, but said that the related evidence-handling would be especially challenging. In addition, U.S. authorities said that they would only share some of the evidence, and not make every witness -- many are, or were, U.S. government employees -- available for a British trial.
McKinnon is far from the first hacker whos been indicted by U.S. authorities. Earlier this year, for example, alleged Anonymous and LulzSec participant Ryan Cleary was indicted by a Los Angeles federal grand jury on hacking charges. Unofficially, however, U.S. authorities have said they
wont seek Clearys extradition
, most likely because hes already being prosecuted by authorities in Britain on charges of launching botnet-driven distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the British Phonographic Industry website, as well as the United Kingdoms Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) website.
More than half of federal agencies are saving money with cloud computing, but security, compatibility, and skills present huge problems, according to our survey. Also in the
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Britain Declines To Prosecute Alleged NASA Hacker