Annie Machon

The Case of Gary McKinnon

I've been following the extraordinary case of Gary McKinnon for years now in a long range kind of way, but we are now in the final throes of his prolonged fight against extradition to the USA, and he needs all the support we can give him.  The Daily Mail recently started a campaign against his extradition:  it's not often I agree with the Wail, but I'm wholeheartedly in favour of this initiative. 

For those of you who have been living in a bunker for the last 7 years, Gary McKinnon is the self-confessed geek who went looking for evidence of UFOs and ETs on some of America's most secret computer systems at the Pentagon and NASA. 

And, when I say secret, obviously I don't mean in the sense of encrypted or protected.  The Yanks obviously didn't feel that their national defence warrants even cursory protection, as Gary didn't have to hack his way in past multiple layers of protection.  Apparently the systems didn't even have passwords.

Gary, who suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, is no super hacker.  Using a basic PC and a dial-up connection in his bedroom, he managed to sneak a peek at the Pentagon computers, before kindly leaving a message that the US military might like to have a think about a little bit of basic internet security.   Hardly the work of a malignant, international cyber-terrorist.

UK police investigated Gary soon after this episode, way back in 2002.  All he faced, under the UK's 1990 Computer Misuse Act, would have been a bit of community service if he'd been convicted.  Even that was moot, as the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute.

And that, as they say, should have been that. 

However, in 2003 the UK government passed yet another draconian piece of law in response to the "war on terror" - the Extradition Act.  Under this invidious, one-sided law, the US authorities can demand the extradition to America of any British citizen, without presenting any evidence of the crime for which they are wanted.  Needless to say, this arrangement only works one way: if the Brits want to extradite a suspect from the US they still have to present prima facie evidence of a crime to an American court.  The Act also enshrines the questionable European arrest warrant system in British law.

So how on earth did the half-wits in Parliament come to pass such an awful law?  Were they too busy totting up their expense fiddles to notice that they were signing away British sovereignty?  This law means that it is easier for a US court to get a Brit in the dock than it is for them to get a US citizen from another state.  In the latter case, evidence is still also required.

Let's get this straight.  The UK authorities decided not to prosecute in this country.  Even if they had, Gary would probably have been sentenced to community service.  However, if he is extradited, he will get up to 70 years in a maximum security prison in the US.

So a year after Gary's bedroom hack, and after the CPS had decided there was no case to answer, the US authorities demanded Gary's extradition retroactively.   The UK government, rather than protecting a British citizen, basically said "Yes, have him!".  Gary has been fighting the case ever since.

He has not been alone.  Many people from across the political spectrum see this unilateral law as invidious.  And the government reckoned without his mum.  Janis Sharp has fought valiantly and indefatigably to protect her son from this unjust extradition. She has lobbied MPs, talked to newspapers, gained the support of many public and celebrity figures.  She even recently met the PM's wife, Sarah Brown, who was reportedly in tears for Gary.  Yet still the majority of the parliamentary half-wits refuse to do anything. 

In fact, it gets worse.  Over the last few years many MPs have signed Early Day Motions supporting Gary's fight against extradition.  But in a recent debate in the House of Commons about the need to revise the provisions of the Extradition Act, 74 of these MPs betrayed him and voted for the government to keep the Act in place.  Only 10 Labour MPs stuck to their guns and defied the party Whip.  One Labour MP, Andrew MacKinley, will stand down at the next election in protest at this hypocrisy.

This week is crunch time: on Friday a final judicial ruling will be made about the case.  It was the last throw of the legal dice for Gary.  If this fails, he will have to rely on political intervention, which is possible, to prevent his harmful, unjust and unnecessary extradition to the USA.  Please visit the Free Gary website and do all you can in support.

Echelon and the Special Relationship

Journalist and writer James Bamford, has a new book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" (Doubleday), which came out this week in the United States.

Bamford is a former producer at ABC News of thirty years' standing, and his book has caused quite a stir. One of his key gripes is the fact that foreign companies try to acquire work in sensitive US departments. He cites in particular the attempt in 2006 of Israeli data security company, Check Point Software Technologies, to buy an American company with existing contracts at the Defence Department and the NSA. This deal was stopped after the FBI objected.

Foreign software and security companies working within intelligence agencies are indeed a problem for any country. It compromises the very notion of national sovereignty. In the UK, MI5 and many other government departments rely on proprietary software from companies like Microsoft, notorious for their vulnerability to hackers, viruses and back door access. Should our nation's secrets really be exposed to such easily avoidable vulnerabilities?

Another section of the book to have hit the headlines is Bamford's claims that bedroom "conversations" of soldiers, journalists and officials in Iraq have been bugged by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Bamford, who is by no means a fan of the NSA in its current rampant form, makes the mistake of thinking that in the innocent days pre-9/11, the agency respected democratic rights enshrined in the US constitution and never snooped on US citizens in their own country.

While technically this might be true, does nobody remember the ECHELON system?

ECHELON was an agreement between the NSA and its British equivalent GCHQ (as well as the agencies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) whereby they shared information they gathered on each others' citizens. GCHQ could legally eavesdrop on people outside the UK without a warrant, so they could target US citizens of interest, then pass the product over to the NSA. The NSA then did the same for GCHQ. Thus both agencies could evade any democratic oversight and accountability, and still get the intelligence they wanted.

Special relationship, anyone?

Singularity Society

And so to my first transhumanist meeting recently. No, this is not some kinky practice imported from Holland. Transhumanism is the study of the impact of developing technologies on the human – the eradication of genetically inherited diseases, increased longevity, augmentation and mental enhancement.

I've been introduced to the implications of cutting edge technology over the last year – and it's been a bit of a culture shock for a classicist. But as technology develops faster and faster, probably leading to a “singularity” where artificial intelligence develops exponentially and humans cannot keep up, we all need to start factoring this in to how we see the world changing in the next 20 – 30 years.

The vast majority of us think that the current political and economic frameworks will continue in pretty much the same format, with the odd war and recession, in the foreseeable future. Few of us factor in the seismic shift that is looming. We worry about the credit crunch, the price of food and fuel, Big Brother (alas, generally the TV show, not the deteriorating social contract between governments and the governed), and the wars. But what will happen if we wake up one day to find that we as a species are no longer the numero uno intelligence on the planet?

This need not be dystopic. We may suddenly find enduring problems for humanity – including the biggies like war, plague and famine - are eradicated. And we could see an advance in biotech that will lead to healthier and longer lives for all of us.

But one stray thought keeps recurring to me: the great MI5 is apparently failing to see the implications. What will happen to their 100-year non-disclosure rule when we all live to be 150? Will we finally get to see our files? My betting is that they will suddenly find urgent national security reasons to extend the secrecy time frame.....

CCTV doesn't prevent crime

So, the argument about CCTV and our big brother society rumbles on. A senior policeman, Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office (Viido) at New Scotland Yard, has been quoted as saying that only 3 per cent of crimes have been solved by CCTV evidence. Despite the UK having the highest per capita number of CCTVs in the world, this brave new world has failed to make us safer.

A few other police forces, and naturally the security companies flogging the kit, say that CCTV has at least dramatically reduced opportunistic crimes. Who should we believe?

What cannot be disputed is the fact that there are well over 4,000,000 CCTVs in this country, and the organisation, Privacy International, assesses that we are the most watched citizenry in Europe.

While some law-abiding citizens say they feel intimidated by CCTV and how the information could potentially be misused, most people seem not to care. In fact, the majority apparently feel safer if they can see CCTV on the streets, even if this pervasive surveillance has in no way discouraged crimes of violence. So why this gap between perception and reality?

One of my pet theories has always been to blame Big Brother. No, not the book. I have always been flummoxed by the popularity of the TV show and the plethora of reality TV spin-offs. My instinctive reaction was that it was similar to being “groomed” to accept round-the-clock intrusion into our personal lives. More than accept – desire it. The clear message is that such surveillance can lead to instant fame, wealth and access to the Z-list parties of London. And for that we are sleep-walking into a real Orwellian nightmare.

Slightly flippant theories aside, it is interesting that one of the most cited examples of the need for CCTV was the Bishopsgate bombing in London in 1993. In this case a lorry bomb, filled with a tonne of home made explosive (HME) was detonated in the heart of the city of London by the IRA. One person was killed, many were injured, and hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage was caused, not to mention the fact threat the IRA scored a huge publicity coup.

But this had nothing to do with the lack or otherwise of CCTV in the streets of the City. It was an intelligence failure, pure and simple.

This attack could and should have been prevented. It occurred while I was working in MI5, and it was widely known in the service at the time that the bomber should have been arrested six months before during a surveillance operation. Despite the fact that he was seen checking out another lorry bomb in storage, he was allowed to walk free and escape to the Republic of Ireland due to procedural cock-ups. Months later, he returned to the City and bombed Bishopsgate.

By relying increasingly on technologies to protect us, we are following in the footsteps of the Americans. They have always had an over-reliance on gadgets and gizmos when seeking to investigate criminals and terrorists: satellite tracking, phone taps, bugs. But this hoovering up of information is never an adequate replacement for precise investigative work. Plus, any criminal or terrorist worth their salt these days knows not to discuss sensitive plans electronically.

Scatter-gun approaches to gathering intelligence, such as blanket surveillance, still at this stage require human beings to process and assess it for evidential use. That, according to DCI Neville, is part of the problem. There is just too much coming in, not enough staff, insufficient co-operation between forces, and the job lacks perceived status within the police.

The other problem of an over-reliance on technology is that it can always be hacked. The most recent hacking has broken the RFID chips that we all carry in our passports, Oyster cards and the planned ID cards. New technologies cannot guarantee that our personal data is secure, so rather than protecting us, they make us more liable to crimes such as identity theft.

So once again national and local government bodies have rushed to buy up technology, without fully thinking through either its application or its usefulness. And without fully assessing the implications for a free society. Just because the technology exists, it does not mean that it is fit for purpose, nor that it will make us safer.