Hacker McKinnon gets a friend in Boris Johnson
By Nicole Kobie in Editorial
Posted in government on
On behalf of admitted hacker Gary McKinnnon, London mayor Boris Johnson wrote in yesterday’s Telegraph an open letter of sorts to the new American president, Barack Obama.
Johnson was laying out an argument for why McKinnon shouldn’t be extradited to the US to face hacking and even terrorism charges, for sneaking into NASA and Pentagon systems just a short while after September 11, which if nothing else, was a pretty stupid thing to do.
Johnson makes the usual arguments — McKinnon is crazy, he has Asperger’s, he was hunting UFOs, he did no damage, it was easy, aliens really do exist — none of which seem very good reasons to dodge the law, but then, I also don’t think McKinnon’s really likely to do much harm to the world if he’s left out of prison, so who really cares?
Johnson does, clearly, taking time away from his busy role as leader of one of the world’s largest, most demanding cities at a time of crisis in its leading economic market to defend McKinnon with an alien-joke filled rant.
But to ask Obama, he who is busy saving the world and all that, to step in? Surely Johnson is kidding? Referring to McKinnon’s case, he writes: “There is one last piece of neocon lunacy that needs to be addressed, and Mr Obama could sort it out at the stroke of a pen.”
I’m not sure Obama has that power, but even so, I am pretty sure he has a whole big massive bloody freaking huge list of neocon lunacies that still need sorting. Eight years worth, in fact.
Once he’s finished sorting out the Middle East, saving the US and world economies, shutting down Guantanamo Bay, and overturning other, uh… issues left by the last administration, there’s the US healthcare and education systems that need a look-in, too.
No wonder then, that Obama’s inauguration speech asked people to take responsibility for their own lives, and maybe McKinnon, Johnson and the UK powers-that-be should do the same. It’s time the UK courts and government made a decision on this seven-year-old case and either ship McKinnon across the pond for his trial or finally refuse to extradite him, thereby taking it out of Obama’s busy hands. Why is Johnson demanding action from another government when he could just as easily demand it from his own?
Besides, it’s highly unlikely (in my opinion, and I’m no lawyer) that McKinnon will be sentenced to the oft-quoted 70 years in prison — and even if he does, at least he doesn’t have to worry about ending up in Gitmo anymore…
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
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