Cameron: Decision on Gary McKinnon will be ‘weeks rather than months’

Graham cluley
Graham Cluley
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British Prime Minister David Cameron has said that he expects a decision to be made about the fate of hacker Gary McKinnon in “weeks rather than months”.

In an interview with Tom Bradby, a reporter with ITN TV news, Cameron explained that the Home Secretary’s decision about whether McKinnon would be extradited to the USA or not was “complicated”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdc_Fo5ydjE&fs=1&hl=en_GB&rel=0]

McKinnon, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, was arrested seven years ago after breaking into computers belonging to the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA.

The 44-year-old hacker claims that he accessed the computer systems only to hunt for top secret information about anti-gravity propulsion systems and alien technology, which he believed the authorities were hiding from the public.

For their part, the US authorities claim that McKinnon caused some $800,000 worth of damage.

In May, British Home Secretary Theresa May put…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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