Erik Davis, contributing editor to Wired magazine and author of the seminal Techgnosis, and Ken Hollings, author of Destroy All Monsters and regular contributor to The Wire magazine, will consider the history, technology and meaning of the music of Outer (and Inner) Space.
UFO Hacker McKinnon’s extradition order is to be reassessed in the High Court on 25 May, under a new Home Secretary. Let’s hope they see sense and recognise that he has been punished enough for his harmless, if foolish, crime.
Cyberspace doesn’t exist any more than never-never land. I was no more in America than anyone who is on a long-distance telephone call. The fiction of cyberspace should be properly tested in a British court because it is no more real than Santa Claus. They cannot “return” me to a country I wasn’t in, yet they continually refer in court to “returning me”. If I was being returned to the place where my crime was committed, I would be returned to Crouch End. I am not a fugitive, I was physically in North London and have remained in North London.
I was arrested in March 2002 and was allowed to remain on the internet until June 2005, which shows that my presence on the internet was not considered any risk whatsoever. Only after the US requested my extradition several years later once the UK was using the one-sided extradition treaty where no evidence was required to extradite any UK citizen was I told not to use the internet.
In Mirage Men I suggest that McKinnon fell into an ET honey-trap, similar to the one that caught another UK hacker, Matthew Bevan, back in 1996. We’ll probably never know why the US decided to come down so hard on McKinnon, though I don’t believe it has anything to do with space navies or the suppression of free energy. My guess is that it was probably a face-saving exercise that has now grown out of all proportion to the original crime. I wish him luck anyway.
Full interview at The Independent