LONDON: A Briton wanted in the United States for breaking into NASA and Pentagon computers in “the biggest military hack of all time” lost an appeal against his extradition on Friday, making a US trial more likely.
Gary McKinnon, 43, has fought a three-year battle to avoid extradition, including going to the European Court of Human Rights, but he appeared to have run out of options as Britain’s High Court ruled against his latest appeal.
The court rejected arguments by defense lawyers that extraditing McKinnon, who was recently diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, would have disastrous consequences for his health, saying that while he would undoubtedly suffer by being extradited, the process of the law trumped those concerns.
Judges also dismissed his calls for a judicial review of the case. Lawyers had challenged a refusal by Britain’s chief prosecutor to allow McKinnon to be tried in Britain, which would have avoided any need for extradition.
“For the reasons set out in the judgment, the claims against the secretary of state and the Department for Public Prosecutions are dismissed,” Lord Justice Stanley Burnton said. Whether the decision can be appealed to Britain’s highest court, the Supreme Court, will be decided later, Burnton said.
If he is convicted by a US court, McKinnon could face up to 70 years in prison.
McKinnon, whose lawyers describe him as a “UFO eccentric” who used the Internet to search for alien life, is accused of causing the US Army’s entire network of more than 2,000 computers in Washington to be shut down for 24 hours in what US authorities called “the biggest military hack of all time.”
He was arrested in 2002 after US prosecutors charged him with illegally accessing computers, including systems at the Pentagon and NASA, and causing $700,000 worth of damage.
McKinnon told Reuters in 2006 that he was just a computer nerd who wanted to find out whether aliens really existed and became obsessed with trawling through large military data networks for any proof that they might be out there.
He used his own computer with a 56K dial-up modem at his London home with no password protection and somehow managed to evade every security measure the US military had adopted.
His mother was angry at the latest setback.
