Hurrah, and indeed, Huzzah.

About bloody time. This is great news.

Took em bleeding long enough!

+1. I still can't believe the USA has the automatic right to extradite someone for a crime commited in another country. If an American tried to attack/infiltrate MI5/6, I doubt the UK would try to extradite them here.

I'm fairly sure they'd try. I'm also fairly sure the US would just tell us to bugger off (ref: That case where two US aircraft shot up a UK infantry platoon in Iraq). Which is what we should have done right at the start of all this rigmarole.

Yet another self confessed criminal walks free.
He should have been sent.

The servers and computers that were hacked were in the USA. They should have every right to extradite him.

If I steal your cashpoint card and take money out with it, am I prosecuted where you are, or where the computers the bank uses to hold your transaction record is? Crimes are prosecuted in the real world, not on the internet.

Jon

Where is the cash machine? That's where you took the money out.
In the real world the systems were hacked in America, the commands to do so were sent from the UK.

No he should have been tried here. This was nothing to do with justice but revenge. He could still be prosecuted under the computer misuse act.


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There is no 'real world' in the context of data. There is only 'a real world' in the context of people and their actions. In the real world, a man sat in his bedroom in the UK typed things on a keyboard. Another man sat in an office in the US noticed that something apparently criminal had occurred by looking at a screen. The idea the latter of those places is a more valid place to prosecute than the former is nonsensical.

Your own response to my example shows this - you yourself state the crime doesn't occur where the server holding the data is but where concrete actions happen (i.e. where the money is taken out of the bank). This is because you know intuitively that's where 'the real world' begins. This is why, for example, the members of Anonymous involved in the PSN hack are being prosecuted where they are, not in Japan where Sony's servers are.

The law interacts with the internet where the criminal is when the crime is committed because anything else is a road to political chaos and madness. The alternative opens the door for any government to pass draconian laws and then attempt to prosecute the citizens of other countries for breaking them in their own countries provided some tangential link can be established.

This is simply not how law in 'the real world' works and it never has. And, finally, someone in the UK government has had the spine to tell the Americans that.

IMO they shouldn't be able to try him here as no crime was committed here. Given this ruling, it means he would get away with a crime he's admitted to scott free.
(his motives are irrelevant, he still broke the law)

If he broke UK law, he should be tried in a UK court and sentenced. If it means imprisonment, it should be in a UK jail.

Someone in the UK was prosecuted for "racing" on the roads. It had been captured on video by someone else and uploaded to youtube. A cop in America noticed it and alerted the UK police who then investigated. This is the correct course of action. The American cop did not try to extradite the UK citizen for a crime committed in the UK just because it was noted by an American.

How many Chinese people are extradited for doing the same kind of thing? The only reason this was allowed to happen is because the US has its sausage in the UK's piehole.