Brits: U.S. Passed a New Law Just to Nail Gary McKinnon

[The Straight Story]

Brits: U.S. Passed a New Law Just to Nail Gary McKinnon
By Kevin Poulsen EmailSeptember 23, 2008 | 6:54:04 PMCategories: Cover-Ups, Crime

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"The U.S. authorities are so desperate to extradite my son that they have changed the law. Now he faces 60 years in jail," writes Janice Sharp, the mother of U.K. hacker Gary McKinnon, in an op-ed in the Guardian yesterday.

That's a remarkable claim, not least because the British press has long reported that the 42-year-old hacker faces 60 years, 70 years, 80 years and life imprisonment, while McKinnon himself thinks he's headed for Guantanamo Bay. Wouldn't 60 years be a reduced sentence?

"Several weeks ago," Sharp explains, "the goalposts were moved yet again when the U.S. introduced a new law whereby no proof of damage was required where military computers were concerned. For the American law to then have been conveniently changed at such a crucial time does little to give us any faith in such a legal system."

The mystery deepens when one tries to track down this legislation, which has proven as elusive as the UFOs McKinnon claims he was hunting for in Pentagon computers. We've tried searching on all the obvious bill names -- "The Get Gary McKinnon At All Costs Act of 2008," for example -- to no avail.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/brits-us-passed.html