McKinnon's last hope of rescue!

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History Channel Airs Acclaimed UFO Documentary 'I Know What I Saw,' Directed By James Fox, On October 19

Film Exposes Covert U.S. Investigation of Worldwide UFO Cases

Computer hacker Gary McKinnon could be facing 70 years in prison for hacking into government UFO files. He should have just waited until Monday, October 19th @ 9 p.m. ET/PT when investigative filmmaker James Fox (of FCZ Media) provides answers on the UFO phenomenon in his feature-length documentary I Know What I Saw airing exclusively on The History Channel. Fox assembled the most credible UFO witnesses from around the world to testify at The National Press Club in Washington D.C. For the first time, Air Force Generals, astronauts, military and commercial pilots, and government and FAA officials from seven countries speak out on national television, providing shocking evidence that UFOs are real.

Narrated by James Fox, I Know What I Saw traces sightings and reports worldwide. Testimony includes high-ranking military personnel, pilots and astronauts from France, England, Belgium, Chile, Peru, Iran and the United States who all call on the U.S. Government to re-open its investigation into UFOs - which the Air Force shut down over 30 years ago.

In I Know What I Saw, filmmaker James Fox uncovers new details of a UFO landing at an American Air Force base in the UK. U.S. Air Force Col. Charles Halt recently admitted, "In December 1980 I was involved in a multi night incident where a UFO landed, was touched, photographed and departed rapidly. Two nights later, five or more intelligently controlled objects, assumed to be extraterrestrial, returned to the area and were witnessed by numerous people." Air Force Sergeant, James Penniston, copied strange markings from the landed UFO which filmmaker James Fox has analyzed by an expert symbologist for the very first time. The results are startling.

Senator John McCain and Arizona Governor Fife Symington reveal their efforts to investigate the infamous "Phoenix lights" sighting. "I believe that our government should take an active role in investigating this very real phenomenon," said Symington, who was himself a witness to the reported mile wide craft seen by thousands in Arizona while he was governor.

For more information about James Fox and I Know What I Saw go to www.iknowwhatisawthemovie.com

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Asperger Syndrome, a neurological disorder characterized by obsessive behavior and deficiencies in social interaction.

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At this time there is a great deal of debate as to exactly where AS fits. It is presently described as an autism spectrum disorder and Uta Frith, in her book AUTISM AND ASPERGER'S SYNDROME, described AS individuals as "having a dash of Autism". Some professionals feel that AS is the same as High Functioning Autism, while others feel that it is better described as a Nonverbal Learning Disability. AS shares many of the characteristics of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder; Not otherwise specified), HFA, and NLD and because it was virtually unknown until a few years ago, many individuals either received an incorrect diagnosis or remained undiagnosed. For example, it is not at all uncommon for a child who was initially diagnosed with ADD or ADHD be re-diagnosed with AS. In addition, some individuals who were originally diagnosed with HFA or PDD-NOS are now being given the AS diagnosis and many individuals have a dual diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome and High Functioning Autism.

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said by James Slack :

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Change Gary McKinnon extradition law, Boris Johnson urges Lords

Boris Johnson has urged peers to vote today to change the law to prevent a repeat of the 'blunt and brutal' extradition of Gary McKinnon.

Tories and LibDems in the Lords are expected to support the introduction of an amendment which would prevent those who commit crimes in Britain being sent overseas to face trial.

Asperger's sufferer Gary, 43, is being sent to the U.S. under the controversial 2003 Extradition Act.

He faces 60 years in jail for hacking into computers from the bedroom of his North London flat to search for evidence of the existence of aliens.

London mayor Mr Johnson, who wrote to all peers last night, said: 'It is scandalous that under the current laws the UK has so little influence over extradition.

'There are a number of serious flaws in the Extradition Act in its current form. As we have seen with the case of Gary McKinnon it can be a blunt and brutal law. Gary's appalling situation is just one high profile case we are aware of, but a number of other UK citizens are also in similar positions and are currently awaiting their fate.

'I urge the peers to take the wellbeing of the people of this country seriously and use this opportunity to change this cruel law.'

The introduction of the amendment has been delayed since 2006, when the Government approved the law but said it could only be enacted after a new vote. It has since frustrated attempts to hold such votes.

Gary is being backed by a Daily Mail campaign. LibDem home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said yesterday: 'These amendments should have been enacted by the Government years ago but their craven attitude towards the United States has got in the way.

'It is only fair that people are tried here for crimes committed here unless a judge rules it is in the best interests of justice to extradite them.'

On Saturday Home Secretary Alan Johnson halted Gary's extradition process to examine new medical evidence about his psychiatric health. Experts have warned he could commit suicide.

The Government will oppose today's vote. A Home Office spokesman said the amendment 'would place the UK in breach of its international treaty obligations'.

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No Prison Time for Romanian NASA and U.S Navy Hacker

11th of November 2008

He was sentenced to 16 months of suspended prison, and a fine of almost $240,000.

Victor Faur from Arad, Romania, caught the international headlines in 2006, when he was indicted in the U.S. for one count of conspiracy and nine of computer intrusion, for obtaining unauthorized access to systems belonging to several government institutions. After a trial that lasted almost a year, a local Romanian court sentenced him to 16 months in prison, and requested that he pay $240,000 in restitution to the affected parties.

According to the evidence, Mr. Faur, going by the online nickname of SirVic, was the leader of a group of hackers known as the WhiteHat Team, who used the Undernet IRC network to communicate. From November 2005 to September 2006, he personally hacked into systems belonging to the U.S. Navy, NASA and the Department of Energy, from his home in Romania, thus transforming one of the NASA computers into an online chat server.

The U.S. authorities claimed that the damages caused amounted to $1.5 million, but Faur argued in his defense that he only hacked into those systems in order to prove that they were vulnerable, and that he did not cause any damage to them. According to him, he only targeted those servers because their group held regular contests to determine who was more skilled, and could hack into the most secure systems. In addition, he said that the accounts used to access the NASA servers had been provided to him by another Romanian hacker from Constanta, whom he only knew online.

The hacker could not be extradited because the agreement signed between Romania and the U.S. dated back to 1921, and did not include the new IT-related offenses. As a result, the U.S. authorities accepted him to be judged in Romania. According to Romanian law, if he had been found guilty on all accounts, Faur would have risked a maximum sentence of 12 years in prison, compared to the 54 years of prison time he might have received if judged in the U.S.

Even so, one of the hacker's defense attorneys, Mircea Borza, said that they would appeal to a higher court because “we did not expect this sentence.” He claims that Faur was only guilty of unauthorized access to the systems, which he also admitted, but not of deleting, intercepting or altering any data. ”We still believe that our defense was strong and proved that Victor Faur did not commit those offenses. [...] We also think that the sum of money which is to be paid is very high,” the lawyer told a local paper.

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20th March 2009

Romanian police arrest Pentagon hack suspect.

Romanian police have arrested a hacker suspected of breaking into Pentagon systems and planting malware.

Eduard Lucian Mandru, 23, a business studies student from Iasi, Romania, is suspected of breaking into US Department of Defense systems in 2006. A criminal hacker nicknamed "Wolfenstein" accessed sensitive systems at that time, using compromised servers located in Japan in a bid to cover his tracks.

The cracker infected an unspecified number of systems with an unidentified information-stealing trojan before deleting access logs, Softpedia reports. US authorities say that damages in sorting out the resulting mess came to over $35,000.

One of the few leads investigators had to go on was a Yahoo email address - wolfenstein_ingrid@yahoo.com - linked to the attack. Mandru recently posted his CV on job-seeking websites giving this Yahoo address as his email contact, a blunder that reportedly put investigators on his trail. Police raided Mandru's home, seized computer equipment and took him into custody on Wednesday.

If found guilty of computer hacking offences, Mandru faces a prison term of between three and 12 years.

Victor Faur, AKA SirVic, another Romanian hacker alleged to have broken into US military systems, received a suspended prison sentence of 16 months. At the time of his arrest, the US-Romania extradition agreement then in force omitted hacking offences. A revamped extradition treaty does include hacking offences, making Mandru a possible candidate for extradition.

It's unclear if US authorities will take this option.

Although the apparent blunder that put investigators onto Mandru trail appears dumb, cybercrooks often make such mistakes.

"Hackers who deface police and military websites often leave email addresses," explained Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. Jeffrey Lee Parson, convicted author of a variant of the infamous Blaster worm, coded the malware to phone home for updates from a website he owned. He also wrote his online nickname (teekid) into the fabric of Blaster-B, Cluley added.

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But the drugs and therapy sessions that are prescribed to adults with psychiatric problems aren't likely to help people with a condition like Asperger's, which develops in childhood and never goes away. Andy Thomson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy, suggests punishing Asperger's criminals with long, supervised probation periods instead.

That's largely how the courts have dealt with autism, which first showed up in criminal cases in the 1950s. Still, the legal system isn't always consistent in its treatment of criminals with developmental disabilities, and the sentences handed down to autistic defendants can vary widely depending on the court. Asperger's may prove even more challenging than autism, because it lacks the well-defined intellectual deficits that make the latter relatively easy to diagnose. How will a judge determine whether a given diagnosis of Asperger's is scientifically valid, let alone decide how the disorder relates to a particular crime? These are two of many questions that the criminal justice system faces as the number of children and adults being diagnosed with Asperger's continues to rise.

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We sat in the back of his local pub, in a garden in the late afternoon. Gary is lucid, eloquent and extremely intelligent. He made it clear that the real reason the Americans want to extradite him is not for any damage he has done, for in fact there wasn't any. They are pursuing him is because of what he might have seen. Specifically, documents revealing a list of "Non-terrestrial officers" and off-world cargo operations somewhere out in space, hinting at the real possibility of military activities taking place in relation to other planets.

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Among other provisions Part 2 of the Act: Extradition to category 2 territories (non-European Arrest warrant territories) has caused some controversy.

The problem arises at the Extradition Hearing stage where among other considerations the District Judge must: Be satisfied that the request contains admissible evidence of the offence sufficient to establish a prima facie case against the person. This requirement does not apply in respect of extradition requests from the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The controversy stemmed from the absence of any reciprocal arrangement in respect of the United States. Therefore there was no requirement on the US to provide prima facie evidence when requesting the extradition of UK residents, both foreign nationals and UK citizens, but as provided by the UK Act it maintained the requirement for the UK to provide such evidence to the US in the reverse situation. This was the subject of concern prior to the passing of the legislation, and a cause of controversy when it was applied.

There is also concern at the loss of entitlement of UK citizens to legal aid for maintaining an adequate defence to criminal charges once they are extradited to US jurisdiction where costs are largely met by the defendant's private means. This has been a cause of controversy in cases where it has been perceived that the UK has suitable legislation for prosecuting offences domestically.

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Common law legal system might have a statute, for example, limiting the time for prosecution of crimes designated as misdemeanors to two years after the offense occurred. Under such a statute, if a person is discovered to have committed a misdemeanor three years ago, the time has expired for the prosecution of the misdemeanor. While on one hand it may seem unfair to forbid prosecution of crimes that law enforcement can now prove to the standard required by law (cf., e.g., Beyond a reasonable doubt, Clear and convincing evidence, and Preponderance of the evidence), the purpose of a statute of limitations or its equivalent is to ensure that the possibility of punishment for an act committed sufficiently long ago cannot give rise to either a person's incarceration or the criminal justice system's activation. In short, unless it be a heinous crime--as a rule, murder; often rape; and occasionally such violent crimes as robbery or arson--social justice as enacted through law has compromised that lesser crimes from long ago are best let be rather than distract attention from contemporary serious crimes.

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said by David Batty and agencies :

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New medical evidence could stop hacker Gary McKinnon's extradition

The home secretary, Alan Johnson, pledged today to examine new medical evidence in the case of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon "very carefully" before approving his extradition to the US on charges of breaking into the Pentagon's military networks.

Johnson told MPs he had "stopped the clock" on proceedings to give McKinnon's lawyers time to consider medical reports and make legal representations.

The home secretary was today also pressed to delay further until an investigation into the US-UK extradition treaty* had been carried out by the Commons home affairs select committee.

He said: "We have stopped the clock ticking on the representation to the European court because new medical evidence has been provided.

"There are two issues upon which Gary McKinnon's legal advisors have argued: the first is that the director of public prosecutions should have tried him in this country.

"The high court in July dismissed that, and wouldn't allow it to go to judicial review."

"I have to ensure that his Article 3 human rights** are being respected. It's that new medical evidence that I will be looking at very carefully".

McKinnon's MP, David Burrowes, said the new medical evidence was "compelling" and detailed the effect extradition would have on McKinnon's Asperger's.

The Conservative MP for Enfield Southgate urged the home secretary not to execute the extradition order until after the select committee inquiry on 10 November***.

When McKinnon was refused permission to appeal to the supreme court earlier this month, Lord Justice Stanley Burnton, who also heard his earlier high court appeal, said extradition was "a lawful and proportionate response" to his alleged offending.

He said McKinnon would be unlikely to succeed with his claim that extradition would breach his right to a private and family life, under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Nor did the court think that extradition to the US would be a breach of his right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3.

In August, Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman said that if McKinnon were convicted by an American court, Britain would move quickly to arrange for him to serve any jail term in the UK.

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said by Ian Grant :

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Change to law could save Gary McKinnon from extradition

The House of Lords is debating a change in the law that could save self-confessed Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon from extradition.

The change to the Policing and Crime Bill would let judges stop an extradition if most of the crime was committed in the UK and it would serve justice to have the trial in the UK.

Home secretary Alan Johnson said earlier he had "stopped the clock" on McKinnon's extradition so that he could consider new medical evidence. McKinnon suffers from Asperger's syndrome, an autistic condition, and has suffered recurrent bouts of depression since his initial arrest in 2002.

The 2003 extradition treaty between the US and UK allows the US to ask for UK nationals to be extradited without having to provide prima facie evidence of wrong-doing. British officials must supply evidence of "probable cause" before the US will extradite one of their nationals for trial in the UK.

Parliament was quick to ratify the treaty in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but Congress still has not. This has led to criticism that the US was abusing the agreement to pursue non-terrorist suspects, or, as in McKinnon's case, where it had little or no hard evidence beyond McKinnon's own confession that he hacked into Pentagon computers.

McKinnon denies US charges that his activities caused damages worth some $800,000, and has fought several court cases to stand trial in the UK rather than the US.

Lord Thomas of Gresford, the Liberal Democrat peer who is proposing the changes, said, "We believe there is a significant imbalance between the requirements of US citizens to this country and the extradition of British citizens to the USA," the Telegraph reported.

MPs on the home affairs select committee will hold a special hearing on the treaty on 10 November.

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said by Craig Woodhouse :

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MP calls for Scot who hacked Pentagon to be given job

Computer hacker Gary McKinnon should be given a job rather than extradited to the United States, as his skills could be "put to good use".

That was the view of MP Keith Vaz, who heads the home affairs select committee. He said McKinnon showed intelligence "far beyond what anyone could imagine" when he hacked into US military networks.

Mr Vaz again urged Home Secretary Alan Johnson to let McKinnon stay in the UK and repeated calls for the UK-US extradition treaty to be reviewed. McKinnon, who was born in Glasgow, suffers from Asperger's syndrome – a form of autism – and faces the prospect of a lengthy prison term if he is sent to the US for trial.

During debate on the Queen's Speech, Mr Vaz said: "The Home Secretary is still considering Gary McKinnon's case. I hope very much that he will … allow Gary McKinnon to stay.

"Anyone who can hack into the computer system of the Pentagon should not actually be sent to trial – I believe he should be offered a job because if he was able to do that, he clearly has intelligence far beyond what anyone could imagine."

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said by Duncan Campbell :

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Don't restart the clock on Gary McKinnon

Enough is enough: the hacker's medical diagnosis means extradition would be disastrous. Alan Johnson must act now

Earlier this year, Professor Simon Baron Cohen presented evidence that, if extradited "there is a risk that he would take his own life." Now, in the latest submission, which the home secretary is asking his advisers to study, Professor Jeremy Turk has an equally disturbing diagnosis. This gives Alan Johnson an honourable opportunity to halt the extradition right now and institute proceedings here.

It is worth reminding ourselves of some of the background. The hacking took place more than eight years ago. At the time, and in the wake of September 11, because of the disparaging comments left by McKinnon – "your security is crap" and so on – the US authorities assumed that something serious might be underway. In all the years since, it has become clear that McKinnon was seeking evidence for his theories about UFOs and a free energy system which he believed might lurk in the computers of Nasa and the Pentagon. On his arrest by the UK police, he admitted his offence immediately.

So who is the victim and what damage has been done? The US military and Nasa have been caused irritation, inconvenience and embarrassment. They have suffered some financial loss in the damage to their computer system, although the figure of $700,000 that the US authorities have advanced is fanciful, much like the old "street values" that customs and excise used to attribute to drugs seizures on the old scientific principal of "think of a number, double it and add a nought". The true financial cost is a small fraction and much of it is merely to install the sort of security system that any self-respecting small business would have had anyway. As Peter Sommer, professor of security at the London School of Economics, has said about the case: "the costs claimed for are features that should have been there in the first place."

There are no security issues at stake here. The whole pursuit of McKinnon is a throwback to the paranoia of the Bush years. The only remaining impetus for carrying on the prosecution is, presumably, "pour encourager les autres" but hackers across the world have been aware of this case for years and the systems have not suffered any similar incursions since. McKinnon, as many American military personnel have laconically noted, did the Pentagon a favour by pointing out their failings.

The political consensus that McKinnon should not be extradited without, at the very least, a guarantee of bail and an immediate post-trial return to the UK, has grown. It spans the spectrum from Boris Johnson and Conservative frontbenchers, through the Lib Dems to former home secretary David Blunkett and all those Labour backbenchers who can still remember why they might have joined the party in the first place; you know, things like a desire for justice, a compassion for the vulnerable. The case has been argued with admirable persistence by the legal team of solicitor Karen Todner and barristers Edward Fitzgerald QC and Ben Cooper.

This saga has been a long one. Enough is enough. It is now time to stop the clock ticking on Gary McKinnon for good.

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