We did have quite a successful PledgeBank write in campaign, in May / June 2006, during the 6 week time period under the Extradition Act 2003 legislation, when the Home Secretary was legally obliged to consider "representations" made to him concerning Gary McKinnon's extradition case.
Nearly 750 people signed that pledge, and, more importantly, a significant number of them acted on it to write personal letters to the Home Secretary John Reid on Gary's behalf, so many, that the Home Office gave up replying to them individually.
See http://www.pledgebank.com/FreeGary
Several people have recently expressed interest in "signing a petition" in support of Gary's plight, and one such petition has now appeared on the Prime Minister's website:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/GaryMcKinnon/
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Stop the extradition to the US of accused hacker Gary McKinnon.Submitted by Callum Guy – Deadline to sign up by: 27 August 2007 – Signatures: 16
[...]
More details from petition creator
In the interests of justice he should be tried under UK law.
[...]
You must be a British citizen or resident to sign the petition.
Or, if you're an expatriate, you're in an overseas territory, a Crown dependency or in the Armed Forces without a postcode, please select from this list:
[...]
N.B. the recent anti-road pricing / snooping petition on the Number 10 Downing Street website achieved 1,791,942 signatures, but this has been rubbished and ignored by Tony Blair, so do not expect what will inevitably be a much smaller petition, to have any influence whatsoever with the current Government.
The High Court Judges who are currently deciding on Gary's Appeal, will not be influenced by this or any other petition either - if they were, then they would be unfit for office.
Richard Horrocks
Gary McKinnon has done nothing more than test incompetent security measures on US military web sites. He should bill the US military for his helpful services. As a result of his efforts, these military web sites SHOULD now be more secure, though given the level of US incompetences perhaps not. Surely the UK judiciary have the spine not to cave into the demands of US bullying and hand Gary over to the grievous injustices he would no doubt suffer under the crazed US establishment. May sanity rule (this is still Britain, even after Blair) and may the UK authorities take a deep breath and dissociate themselves from this pathetic nonsense. Best wishes to you Garry.
Allan Robertson
What is happening to Gary is similar in a way to what happened to Kevin Mitnick, I think he should have never been sent to the US to face the courts over there, he really should have been tried here in the UK with a sentence to fit the crime.
I don't know if anyone has done this before but what about the people over at www.2600.com with their radio show Off The Hook, might be able to help out getting the message out to other people.
ernst Gruengast
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/global/article1471409.ece
»Britain has extradited four times as many people to the US as have been sent in return since the introduction of fast-track extradition
Benjamin Kanarek
Such Hypocrisy. I am a Canadian living in Paris, France. The double standards associated with this fiasco are to say the least ludicrous. Of course the US can bomb innocent civilians using depleted uranium affecting the general public and their own forces and find their actions totally acceptable. Gary taps in to some obscure UFO documents and the S--T hits the fan. "Me thinks you protest too much." If the UK send Gary off the the US any credibility in regards to the UK's autonomy will be lost
Honeybear
Gary admitted in a news article that he smoked hemp while he entered Pentagon cyberspace. Right now, the US is fighting a war on drugs. Maybe, a big part of the US's attraction to Gary is its almost religeous campaign against drugs. The war recently hotted up with the news that 22,000,000 Americans currently smoke hemp. With much of American officialdom now secret, some American bureaucrats may just want Gary for his not-criminal drug use in Britain (I didn't state that smoking hemp is legal in the UK). Below is an article that is undoubtedly making the Feds out to get Gary, foam at the mouth.
"Marijuana - The Wonder Drug, Lester Grinspoon, The Boston Globe, 3-3-7
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- A new study in the journal Neurology is being hailed as unassailable proof that marijuana is a valuable medicine. It is a sad commentary on the state of modern medicine that we still need "proof" of something that medicine has known for 5,000 years.
In the 19th century it became a well-established Western medicine whose versatility and safety were unquestioned. From 1840 to 1900, American and European medical journals published over 100 papers on the therapeutic uses of marijuana, also known as cannabis.
Lester Grinspoon, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is the coauthor of "Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine." This article first appeared in The Boston Globe.
I'm against using psycho-active drugs because they're not necessary. But, using them should be legal for adaults and Gary may be a victim of the war on drugs.
Honeybear
Dear Honeybear:
You've been posting messages that a retired US Army colonel bragged in his book about US government agents murdering at least one US citizen in Roswell, New Mexico because she, he, or they refused to stop talking about UFOs and therefore, assume that the M.I.B. will go after Gary to set an example.
Maybe you should stop talking about the men in black. Obviously, the N.S.A. won't investigate cold case files even though there's no statute of limitations for murder in National Security matters. As you can see from the below excerpt, when the apprentices of the 100 Paper Clip Nazis brought over to the US by the C.I.A. at the end of WWII, want to intimidate other US government officials, they always succeed. They won't do anything about Roswell and they won't act reasonably in the insane extradition of Gary.
http://www.rense.com/general75/manwho.htm
The Man Who
Killed General Patton
From Non scrivetemi
3-3-7
The Assassination Of US General George Patton
"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making the other dumb bastard die for his country."
- General George S. Patton
"I would rather have a German division in front of me than a French division behind me."
- General George S. Patton
"Moral Courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men".
- General George S. Patton
The murder of Patton is known for a fact, known for the very simple reason that an agent of the well-known OSS (Office Of Strategic Services), an American Military Spy named Douglas Bazata, announced it in front of 450 invited guests, nearly all high-ranking ex-members of the OSS at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC the 25th of September, 1979.
Bazata stated, word-for-word: "For diverse political reasons, many extremely high-ranking persons hated Patton. I know who killed him because I am the one who was hired to do it. Ten thousand dollars. General William J. 'Wild Bill' Donovan himself, director Of O.S.S, entrusted ne with the mission. I set up the 'accident.' Since..."
The tragic fate of General George S. Patton convinced other 'colleagues' and their honorable 'compatriots' of the uselessness of fighting against the 'War Powers' That Be.
"Espionage is not a nice thing, nor are the methods employed exemplary. Neither are demolition bombs nor Poison Gas... ...But we will turn terror against him...".
- General William J. 'Wild Bill' Donovan
Honeybear
@ Honeybear,
Here's the thing, at one time fg had some serious concerns about Gary ending up at Guantanomo by extra-ordinary rendition. The way the US is waffling in its war on terror, drugs, Iran, Al Qeida, poverty, etc., Gary very likely could be renditioned to Cuba (by treaty, Quantanomo should have been returned to Cuba). Bush is just a hair's breadth away from turning Gary's case into an espionage case - even if not, he still considers it a National Security case, which is today's excuse for "Might Makes Right" and the major reason he's holding those inmates who have no rights. The bottom line is, if Gary does end up in the US, his rights under US law and treaties with the UK will be severly violated. To set an example of the uselessness of opposing the powers that be. That's why they do these things and announce it to the whole world. Gary is Greek tragedy. Read it and weep.
Scotland is a country. If Gary can make it to Scotland maybe the Scottish government will prevent his extradition.
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=348782&rel_no=1
U.S. Court Allows CIA Kidnapping and Torture
[Opinion] State secret doctrine prohibits judicial review
Darin Foster (dfoster) Email Article Print Article
Published 2007-03-06 16:59 (KST)
Imagine the following. You are on vacation in a foreign country, walking along the street and admiring the sights, when a gang of unidentified men grab you, throw you in the back of a truck, blindfold you, cut your clothes away, put you in a jumpsuit, handcuff you, and finally administer a drug which causes you to lose consciousness.
You wake up in a small prison cell, where you are denied access to your government, your lawyer, and your family. You wait for weeks without being charged. Eventually, you are blindfolded (again), taken to an airfield and flown to an unknown location in an undisclosed country. Here you are kept for months, still cut-off from all contact with the outside world, as you are systematically interrogated, beaten, and drugged.
einstein
Nicaragua. Angola. El Salvador. Cuba. Phillpines. Guatemala. Jamaica.
UK ... ?
De-stabilisation. Ruinification.
Watch for the signs.
Brad
I'm american I just want to say gary is a hero and should be tried in the UK. Hopefully all governments around the world will come clean about the extraterrestrial technology that they have re-engineerd and we will have free energy available for everyone - which will end poverty around the world.
dennis
Yeah that might happen around 2080, but even then it won’t be free energy because they'll rap it up in some other material and blind the public with more costs! But we all like it that way! After all we give the government the responsibility to make choices for us and leave them too it because as individuals we are all just too lazy!!! We have enslaved ourselves!! And we love it!!
Nothing will change!!! Nothing ever happens!!! The needle will return to the start of the song and we'll all sing along like before!!!
janis Sharp
Out of interest, rather than clicking onto your link to the petition for Gary, I went onto the government petition website and searched for it.
I searched under Gary's name; I searched under the originator Callum's name; as suggested on the website I also searched under the deadline date and the petition for Gary could not be found.
So unless you access the petition from the Free Gary website; it is nigh on impossible to find.
I have now browsed/searched most of the categories on the government petition website. This is time consuming and as yet I still haven't found the petition for Gary by searching.
Janis
fg
@ janis - perhaps it was a temporary glitch - the search facility on the PM Petitions website home page
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/
does find it now ok, using either "Gary" (which pulls up half a dozen other petitions) or with "Gary McKinnon" which finds just the right one.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/GaryMcKinnon/
John Aspray
I'm confused. What is the current state of the court case?
fg
@ John - everyone is still awaiting the judgement of the High Court Appeal Judges, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Mr Justice Goldring.
This could be tomorrow or in several months time.
jay
Judgement/decision on Gary's appeal is to be given in the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand tomorrow 3rd. April at 9 or 10am.
J
Paul Bowie
Im dissapointed with the ruling, all he did was show the US websites they had lax security- I just also wish he used his "talents" to hack and destroy our enemies websites like those in Iran and Syria and Al-jazzera etc
Michael Bennett
If American computers are that easy to hack into they should be employing Garry McKinnon not trying to sue him for finding weaknesses in their system.
Red
Hey it's not like the US believes it has the right to hack into anyones computer....
What? you say, ahh Homeland security....yes...free pass in law! Get outa here you mugs!
ANDREW ROSS
The American Government should learn from this episode and improve their security.
This type of thing is not meant to be possible. Hackers don't just live in the West !
Gary should receive a fair trial and Mr. Blair needs more Back-bone.
Jan
David, as fg said, Gary has a right to be tried in the UK his own country. There were no guarantees whatsoever (written or otherwise) had Gary gone to the US voluntarily.
Of course Gary shoudn't have accessed the computers and he bitterly regrets doing so and is fully prepared to be tried in his own country which is the UK but thankfully it was Gary and not an actual terrorist that walked in.
Now wouldn't you think that the Pentagon should have security at least as Good as the average Bank? but no it hasn't. In fact it didn't even have passwords or firewalls and this was ten years after Mathew Bevan had done virtually the same thing when he accessed their computers ten years before.
If you think it's ok for the US government to say that Gary would be tried on two counts and serve a short sentence but then threatened him that if he didn't accept this that they would present him to the court as a terrorist and sentence him to sixty years!!! then you have no idea of what truth or justice is.
The UK doesn't have Plea Bargains as such and UK citizens should not be penalised and threatened with "frying" and life imprisonment (leading to Death in a foreign prison for exercising their legal rights in their own country and denying the accusations of damage.
Gary admitted unauthorised access but has always denied the alleged damage, so you are saying that Gary should plead guilty to damage that he didn't cause? Thankfully Gary's not that stupid.
With no guarantees whatsoever; I have no doubt that the lower sentence offered was a sweetner to tempt Gary over to the US and once there they could do what the hell they wanted with him.
BTW Which school did you attend and who were your teachers? Were you and Gary friends?
So many people claim to be friends or acquaintances of Gary that I just wondered.
Jan
Mike Orton
The US Head of security is at fault. He needs to be spoken to "in good old English engineering language".
It was his fault that a lone geek was able to break into US Government sites from his bedroom.
MvKinnon's PC should have been trashed, a very easy task to do as he was connected to them.
That would have cost peanuts, the legal costs so far must be enormous and the Lame brained IT security men are presumable still in post.
All sites, Gov or multinational, must have a warning that violent, excessive cyber counter measures will be taken against anybody trying to break in, its cheap, quick and effective. I defended a site under attack this way myself and the attacks soon stopped.
Just like the normal terrorist, the only good one is a dead one, and the only good attacking pC is a totally trashed one.
I always blame IT security staff, not the hackers, especialy when its only a geek in his bedroom.
Get real!
mcverdi
this is an important message, dont ever trust your goverment. remember the british goverment is run by lawyers, this poor guy is been sent down because we have children running our country ie school to university ( tho i dont always decry that) to politics GROW UP AMERICA DOES NOT RULE US, sometimes i,d like the goverment and the totally incompetent judges to go on trial. yes judges can sit in ther ivory towers and spew forth there points of law, well done but just remember wer,e human JUST LIKE YOU.
juan lorenzo martin
What a shoddy, gutless bunch of limp-wristed nincompoops running the so-called government of Britain, NOT Great Britain.
Martin Wilson
I am horrified at the ineptness of the British Government in passing such an ill-considered and one sided law.
Adam
The British government really needs to get a spine and stop bowing down to US demands all the time.
If that was an American citizen who hacked into UK millitary files there is NO WAY the US would even consider that person to be extradited to the UK for trial.
This country has become a huge joke with such a spineless government, always on the end of Americas leash and always jumping when they snap their fingers.
Freda Munday
It is time this country stopped giving in to everything the USA wants. Get some backbone
Lewis Peasnell
FAO:- Gordon (Default Prime Minister) Brown
This story makes me ashamed to be british, we all know the UFOs and ETs are matter of fact, the amount of information and evidence to support this online is more phenominal than the fact itself. NASA / JPL Even has pictures of UFO's on their web site (STS088-724-65 through STS088-724-70)
Sooner or later public disclosure of this topic will happen and all these secret documents will be general knowledge anyway. America is a country full of crooks and criminals opperating on the highest levels, the only crime being commited here is against humanity itself, we all as human beings are one and the same and we all have the right to this information. Gary should be awarded a medal for his bravery in trying to uncover the truth, not persecuted and continuously let down by his home land.
My heart is with Gary and his family.
MR L Peasnell.
Ernest Hendricks
So they say we live in a democracy?
G. Forrester
If Gary has committed a crime then he should be tried in this country as it was committed in this country, instead he should get a big thank you from the Americans for exposing such an incompetent regime. In fact I go further and say they should offer him a job uncovering the bungling of those employed in the security of their IT system.
I have been through the American legal system (claiming damages) being the victim of an incomptent American driver and was appalled at the anti British attitude shown in court. With this in mind Gary has no chance of a fair trial over there.
hazel eaton
Free Gary, sack Alan Johnson
shaun buckley
Shaun Mcrae Buckley YOU DONT HAVE TO DONATE MONEY TO MY CAUSE TO HELP STOP GARY MCKINNONS EXTRADITION TO USA http://apps.facebook.com/causes/408188/101280949
James Ferguson
Dear Home Secretary,
I am writing to inform you of my great disappointment at your misplaced decision to extradite Gary McKinnon.
This is a cowardly and cruel judgement and is clearly wrong, as not only is this man mentally disabled but is a British citizen.
Your position is to protect our nationals, not to send them send them to a foreign country where they have a cruel and inhuman penal system.
If he has done wrong why has he not been charged by our police or security services?
Can you tell me why the balance of power lies with the Americans? We have nowhere as much power to exert a similar extradition on any of their citizens, but they are allowed to behave as they wish in our country and throughout the world, with impunity, by employing 'extraordinary renditions' whenever and wherever they like. The recent Italian request for extradition from the U.S. for a number of CIA operatives who had been involved in an illegal and deadly operation on Italian soil is a barefaced example.
Do you have an answer for this imbalance?
The evidence from the latest Iraq enquiry points to your government colluding in an illegal war, this cannot be defended and has cost the lives of countless tens of thousands of innocent people.
Is Gary McKinnon just another excuse for you and your government to grovel once again to the Americans? Is this country so in awe and deferential to them that we give up our people at their slightest whim?
What is the matter with you, have you lost all your humanity and are you sleepwalking in fear of America?
Do you realise how weak and spineless you now appear, when instead, with the right decision you could have turned this country around and made us all proud to be British again.
There is still time to resolve this issue and reverse your decision, if you can but look into your soul and draw the courage to do so.
Yours Sincerely,
charlie
Heyo,
Gary I have been following your case for some time. What amazes me is two things, maybe threee. The first being the "hack" you did, it doesnt sound very advanced, meaning the hack would be of less importance to those in the US, for example we are not talking Jack Bauer breaking into the FBI, we are talking about a low level hack, that returned, "some" information.
The second is WHY WHY WHY should a guy who has actually not hurt anyone physically or emotionally, and by someone i mean a human being. why should they be sent to prison, a place where a great mind that has done wrong be used for securing the system that he broke into? Why lock him up? he poses no threat to society? he has no history of violence. Why as a nation are we obsessed with locking people up that ARE not a threat to other people, just the system that they break?
The third is, why use such a law to extradite Gary, when the consus of parliment and the people, who make up the "democracy" that upholds the law, who all disagree with the decision being upheld. AND finally why is such a law being used against a harmless man?