From this week's Private Eye …
Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, does not normally intervene in espionage cases. The world's leading authority on autism is more accustomed to dealing with the health service than the security service.
Yet the professor's diagnosis of Gary McKinnon is the best hope the 42-year-old Scot has of avoiding a long spell in a US prison that his mother and friends fear will kill him.
The media has turned McKinnon into a man of mystery. According to the BBC he is "the biggest military hacker of all time". According to the American authorities he is a sinister technical genius who damaged 92 computers belonging to the United States army, navy, air force, department of defence and NASA. According to everyone who knows him, they are talking unmitigated tosh.
Rather than being a brilliant code-breaker, McKinnon is a lonely, slightly potty man who would sit quietly listening to his friends rabbiting on in north London pubs and then go home and play on his computer. When the supposedly greatest hacker of all time broke into the supposedly best-protected systems in the world, he used a dial-up 56k modem to connect to the net (the ones that make high-pitched squeaks and burrs, remember?)
Jon Taylor, an old drinking chum of McKinnon, said that far from being the dupe of Russian, Chinese or Islamist propaganda, McKinnon been influenced by the ramblings of The X Files and 9/11 "truthers".
"He just sat in a daze looking for evidence that UFOs had landed on earth", Taylor said. "He got into the Pentagon on many, many occasions. He said it was very easy, more like logging on than hacking in. If you have a password you are ahead of where much of the Pentagon security was at this stage."
"Gary left messages on screens saying such things as "your security is really crap". He also left messages expressing his thoughts on the Iraq war. He just wanted to discover and tell the truth, to tell the US their system was, well, shite at best, and express his feelings about US foreign policy".
You'd have thought the Pentagon might have been grateful to have a harmless obsessive revealing the flaws in its security. Not so. McKinnon faces extradition to a court in Virginia where the maximum penalty for his alleged crimes will be 70 years if convicted.
With an appeal to the European court of human rights his last option, his distraught mother turned to Baron-Cohen. The professor bore out what she and McKinnon's friends thought: he was suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, Baron-Cohen said. His inability to grasp normal rules of social behaviour explained his crime and meant locking him up in a tough US prison could be the end of him.
In a long memo to the Home Office, Baron-Cohen said that McKinnon had no understanding of the legal and political consequences of what he had done. "The fact that he left notes on the computers he hacked into, telling users that their security was useless, shows that he was also wanting to alert the authorities that they needed to improve their security," he wrote.
"McKinnon's current mental state is, from his parents' report, one of great emotional distress, fear and anxiety, and occasional depression. He fears he will be sent to prison, possibly in the US, and he has even felt suicidal. His parents report that he does not have the social skills to be able to cope with prison, which would be the most traumatic environment for a person with Asperger's Syndrome to be in".
There is an alternative. McKinnon's crimes were committed in Britain,. If he were tried and convicted here, as Israeli hackers into the Pentagon system were tried in Tel Aviv, autistic charities would help to supervise a community sentence.
There seems little chance of that. The British judicial system is no more willing to try British hackers than it is to try British fraudsters. As with the Enron Three and Conrad Black, it washes its hands of them and sends them to America, even though, unlike the Enron Three and Conrad Black, Gary McKinnon never harmed a soul.
What's so surprising about that? The British judicial system has far more important things to worry about, like threatening pensioners for cutting the grass outside their houses (see here), victimising ordinary householders when they forget to put their bins out or take them in again, and letting off any real criminals a lightly as possible - they haven't got time to deal with some nutter nobody understands.
We guess that McKinnon stand little chance of coming out of this alive. Betrayed by his own government, he is now in the hands of the most stupid nation on earth, the land where a presidential election debate is an embarrassing exhibition of gibbering inarticulacy because neither of the candidates can string two sentences together and would be demolished by almost any British politician (except Prezza, of course), a country where the same solution is applied to any problem - just throw money at it.
A country where the greatest nuclear arsenal in the world, the secrets of the biggest military machine the earth has ever seen, are in the hands of men who don't know how to keep a couple of passwords safe ...
… a country where almost half the population seriously believe the earth was created in six days by an old man in a frock ...
… a nation where a vice-presidential candidate can liken herself to a pit-bull, and that's generally considered a good thing …
… a country where a retired pilot named Alphonso Nino (Al Nino for short) from California has received hundreds of phone calls, emails and even death threats from people demanding that he stop causing the floods, tornadoes and hurricanes attributed to the fickle ocean current, El Niño. A farmer blamed him for the torrential rain that ruined his strawberry crop and one man even accused Mr Nino of causing his daughter to lose her virginity.
See what I mean? Deeply, terminally stupid.
No, there's absolutely no hope, Gary. You're stuffed. Or you soon will be - Bubba and his friends are waiting for you in the showers.
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