Saturday, August 01, 2009

Nick Clegg on Gary McKinnon

The Lib Dem leader has an article in this morning's Daily Mail on the failure of the British government to prevent the extradition of Gary McKinnon to America.

After a little purple prose - "doomed to pass out the rest of his days in shackles on a foreign shore" - and a good nationalistic point:

You can be sure that if the situation was reversed, American politicians would be moving hell and high water to protect one of their citizens from such a gross injustice.

It is an affront to British justice that no one in the Labour Party has the courage to do the same.

he puts the boot in on Gordon Brown's government very nicely:

Yet this case is about more than legal technicalities and political treaties. It is about compassion, knowing the difference between right and wrong - and the sorry truth is that the Labour Party lost its moral compass long ago.

It tried to stop Gurkhas who were prepared to die for Britain from having the right to live here. It is embroiled in allegations of complicity in torture of British citizens abroad.

And now it shows no sympathy for a man with an autistic spectrum disorder who committed his crimes on British soil, confessed to British police, and simply wants the chance to face up to British justice.

And well done, incidentally, to Nick for getting into the Daily Mail. Its the paper that many of our voters read.

Too often these days attacking the Mail serves as a substitute for political thought on the left.

7 comments:

Frank Little said...

> Too often these days attacking the Mail serves as a substitute for political thought on the left.

Right. Neither let us forget that Vince Cable writes a regular column in the Mail, which is valued by readers and must attract more voters to our cause.

It was also the Mail which took the lead among the media in the campaign to bring the racist murderers of Stephen Lawrence to justice, after the police had failed to do so.

David said...

As politicians, Nick Clegg and Vince Cable need to know what the Daily Mail is saying and all credit to them for getting it to publish their views. Thanks to Jonathan for picking out the interesting bits, I don't have to buy or read the Daily Mail, which leaves me free to go on thinking great thoughts.

Unknown said...

Having just heard Harriet Harman lying through her teeth on the Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning brought me back to the main issue here: the Labour Government, faced with a choice between what the British people want and what the americans want, ALWAYS does what America wants. Now it's poor Gary Mckinnon, a few years ago it was the War on Iraq(remember--they didnt even tell Blair when the attack was to be launched) A little longer in office and we'll have genetically modified food from DelMonte and United Fruit(the owners of Honduras). We are becoming a banana republic. "Friend to America" means fully signed up to the American agenda, which is, after all, global control on one level or another. Cheers to LibDems for being the only major party to show a little gumption.

What was Harriet Harman lying about? She said the Americans had "never failed" to extradite people we wanted. Mmmm. IRA terrorists were regularly given shelter by the American courts. Reason: it's what Americans wanted. They do what they want and WE do what they want.

Daro said...

Anyone with IT knowledge can see that Gary McKinnon is lying in his BBC "Click" interview about how he "hacked" into military and government installations. He says he scanned for the IP's of PC's that had no password.

This is impossible. PC's in a network such as exists in every organisation have NO PUBLIC IP, only local addresses (like 192.168.0.50). Only the server has access to a public IP. And that WILL NOT EVEN INSTALL without first inputting a password. It is written in the installation code. You also cannot remove the password afterwards. Brevity forbids me from writing pages on the details. Just ask any IT Engineer.

The conclusion is: he is obviously a patsy. An outer "wannabe" member of a gang taking the rap for others and unwilling to give them up out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, a feeling of grandiosity and a Joan of Arc complex. This is obvious from the fact he was not even clued in enough to use a simple anonymous proxy and avoid detection.

dreamingspire said...

Daro's comment strikes a chord. In a totally different class of bad behaviour, purely domestic to the UK, the Asperger's son of a friend has clearly been manipulated by others, but so far the authorities are going after him, and there is no sign of them going after others.

Daro said...

"...the authorities are going after him, and there is no sign of them going after others."

[Supposition follows]
The police are outmatched for the task and they know it. A bird in the hand.. so to speak. They don't care who is ultimately responsible. They have someone to reliably pin it on - a "result" in other words. I suspect the Americans know more of the story (it was THEIR servers after all) and keenly, keenly want to get their hands on McKinnon to follow the matter up properly. Hence the strange over-insistence?

The real hackers would've (I'm guessing) routed through his machine turning it into a zombie terminal letting him viscerally partake in the operation without him realising (naive waif that he is) that it was his IP that would be left holding the bag.

That might also explain why there is a contention about damage done and comments left between him and the US authorities. He's simply unaware of what these others did, probably in violation of some part of a promise in their agreement. A sort of "No one get's hurt, right?" demand from his side.

I've met a very senior hacker from Holland once in the course of business. He got his job (head of IT in Alcoa) by hacking them, copying out their data and presenting it to them as a resume. They replaced their IT admin guy with him immediately and he and his "crew" became a sort of global hit team for all their IT installs/upgrades. I was the on-call contract IT guy in Japan employed to be his rep and language assistant for a server upgrade out in the Japanese countrside. Frankly he was an amoral bastard and I felt pretty upset at the way Alcoa had handles their interaction with him; rewarding his criminal manner. Anyway - I've fought of hackers for 10 years now and have some experience with them. For what it's worth - sorry for bragging...

There's 2 sides to every story. And as it's being presented currently, this one reeks!

John said...

@Daro, many servers in US government organisations have actual proper IP addresses and do not need to hide behind NAT, and don't! Gary is not lying, I have people running port scanners against my internet routing machine all the time, once they're onto it I guess they're into my network.