Tuesday 4 August 2009

McKinnon is from Mars, Hain is from Uranus

I've already talked about this fucking mong here*, and absolutely fuck all has changed since I wrote it. It is, to my mind, utterly despicable that the Yanks only have to say "we want this guy" and our craven government will hand him over whereas we have to provide probable cause. I think that the Americans should ALSO have to show probably cause.

But that's all irrelevant in this case. McKinnon, let us not forget, has provided "probable cause" by means of a full confession. His alleged motives are entirely irrelevant. If I murdered you and said it was it was because you were hiding evidence of aliens, I'm sure you'd struggle to feel ... well, anything, really. Because you'd be fucking dead.

And if I had the slightest lingering doubts (which I didn't), they were absolutely swept away by this:

Peter Hain, the Secretary of State for Wales, broke ranks with his colleagues last weekend to call for McKinnon to be tried in the UK


As soon as that perma-tanned fuckwit opens his stupid, pompous, arrogant mouth in favour of something, you just know that you've got to go in the other direction. So, thanks for proving I was right, you cretinous mongtard.

*Go read the original post I made on the subject before you tell me what a cunt I am, please.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not a cunt at all. I commented that the British judiciary is far from independent when it comes to the American Imperium. McKinnon did fuck all harm (save to the US cyberpride) perhaps, now, we will all think small greys are in Area 51? Less flipantly why doesn't the Pentagon Inc pay McKinnon to show them how to block hackers?

SaltedSlug said...

Oh no, he's a cunt, but that's by the by.

RobW said...

You're right of course the evidence would suggest the idiot did commit a crime. The issue is one of foreign policy and whether it should be so easy for the Americans to extradite people from this country.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@RobW: I disagree. Foreign policy doesn't enter into this one. Yes, the treaty is wrong, but it's entirely irrelevant in this case.

I'm much more worried by EU arrest warrants, anyway. They're much more pernicious.

SaltedSlug said...

Well quite. This guy would've been extradited under the conditions in place before this treaty was even drawn up.

Because, as Obo says, he did it and said so.

I've always wondered where we stand with laws which we don't have in common, i.e. things which are illegal in some foreign land with which we have a extradition treaty, which aren't illegal here, especially laws which have an ideological bent. Anyone know what the history is?
Have we ever extradited someone, for example, for drinking in Saudi or similar?

JuliaM said...

"This guy would've been extradited under the conditions in place before this treaty was even drawn up."

That seems to have gone unnoticed in all the shouting and beating of breasts.

And I don't recall the Natwest bankers getting as much (or any, in some papers) sympathy...

woman on a raft said...

Foreign policy doesn't enter into this one.

Yes it does. It's about US extra-territorial ambitions and their tendency to treat everywhere as if they were in the Union and had to surrender unto the Feds.

McKinnon should have been charged under our own statute law, the Computer Misuse Act 1990. He's admitted an offence under s.1, so even our CPS should have been able to bring in the conviction.

Ideally, a US representative should have sworn out a complaint, but the CPS is the body which decides on whether to bring a prosecution and they can do so even without the complainant. Indeed, under their guidelines developed for domestic violence, they can proceed even if the complainant withdraws and begs them not to.

However, if I've read the Act correctly (and it's a shocker to read, considering it's a short one) in order to use the Extradition Act under S.15, it was necessary to establish an offence under S.2 or s.3. Basically, S.1 is just wandering around, for which you can't be extradited, but s.2 involves intent to do damage & s.3 involves doing damage, for both of which you can be extradited.

Note: not 'have to be' but 'can be'. Except, of course, since then we've signed a treaty and passed an act which means they don't have to show anything at all.

It is wrong to say he couldn't have been prosecuted here. He could, and he was not for the political reason that our bunch of theiving Judas priests wanted to appease the US. If they had started our criminal process it would have taken precedence over the extradition, so they didn't start it.

It may be objected that the US is the victim and their computers are in another jurisdiction. True, but having attempted to decode the territorial application section of the act (jurisdiction, s.4), I think it's a crime here. However, if anybody can decipher this and thinks I'm wrong, they might be right.

"section 2 above shall apply as if anything the accused intended to do or facilitate in any place outside the home country concerned which would be an offence to which section 2 applies if it took place in the home country concerned were the offence in question".

I don't know if I've even got the right paragraph. The whole of s.4 is a satire on legal drafting, and the rest isn't much better.

The only crumb of sympathy I have for the US, who should have had more sense than to wave their knickers at Al Qaida and say "look, a nerd can get in, so why don't you have a try", is that our own judiciary have been hearing cases about publication and have been deluding themselves that they can apply UK publications law simply because a thing is read by somebody here.

They should have told Roman Polanski to go sue Vanity Fair in the US if he didn't like what they wrote, and instead they stupidly created libel shopping, which has annoyed the US tremendously and is just as wrong in terms of extra-territorial ambitions as the US is.

It's not only Sharia mullahs who think they can impose their law out of area.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

@woar: I don't think the CPS is guided by our foreign policy. I think they're just completely fucking useless.

SaltedSlug said...

I don't think the CPS is guided by our foreign policy. I think they're just completely fucking useless.

This theory has legs.

Mrs Slug is a solicitor and she holds the CPS in the kind of contempt/pity usually reserved for crack whores in gutters.

woman on a raft said...

Only without the tang of pity.

Anonymous said...

Obnoxio The Cunt lives up to his name.

SaltedSlug said...

Ah, the mong delegation has arrived.