Lawyers forself-confessed hacker Gary McKinnonwill ask the High Court on Tuesday to postpone its hearing
into whether Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's decision to extradite
him to the US should stand.
They will argue that the director of public prosecutions, Keir
Starmer, has indicated he needs four weeks to consider a
fresh appeal to try Gary McKinnon in the UK. The delay would
give Starmer that time.
McKinnon has been fighting extradition charges since 2005, when
the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, acceded to a US request to
extradite him.
The US charges McKinnon with hacking into US government and
military computers and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of
damage. It claims McKinnon's exploits, between 2001 and 2002, were
the
greatest military hack of all time.
McKinnon has written to Starmer to admit to the hacking, but
denied he caused damage. According to Karen Todner, McKinnon's
lawyer, the National High Tech Crime Unit had found no evidence on
McKinnon's computer that he had damaged US systems.
Messages he left on US computers accusing the US of political
terrorism in the run up to the invasion of Iraq were
"cyber-graffiti," his mother Janis Sharp, told a press conference
today.
McKinnon indicated at the press conference that he regarded the
US charges as absurd. He questioned whether it was really possible
for a single person using a dial-up personal computer could, in
2001, bring down entire military networks, as alleged.
Responding to questions, he said it was true he had received
letters from US authorities in effect thanking him for showing up
vulnerabilities of the US networks.
"Some thought I'd done the country a service," he said. "Perhaps
they were thankful it was me and not Al Qaeda."
He said the computers he had hacked originally had no password
or firewalls to protect them, at least to start with. In earlier
interviews, he admitted writing scripts to harvest and test
passwords. Even then, he said, once one US computer "trusted" him,
most of the others on the same network did too.
This allowed him to search for information about unidentified
flying objects and new technology that produced free energy that he
believed the US was hiding from the world. He said he had found
evidence of UFOs but not of the energy technology.
In
evidence to the House of Lords, which heard McKinnon's appeal
against extradition and refused it, lawyers for the US said the
former systems administrator had hacked some 73,000 computers.