British student Lauri Love has been accused of computer hacking has lost his appeal against extradition to the US where he faces decades in prison, a court has ruled.
A judge at Westminster magistrates’ court ruled that the 31-year-old should be extradited to face charges, which, if convicted, could lead to him being jailed for up to 99 years in a US prison.
His case will now be sent to Amber Rudd, the home secretary, and he is expected to appeal.
The FBI and Department of Justice allege that Mr Love was involved in hacking into government agencies including the US Army, NASA, the Federal Reserve and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The indictments cite evidence that Mr Love used pseudonyms to talk about the hacks in online chat rooms.
Lawyers for Mr Love, who has Asperger syndrome — a form of autism — have argued that subjecting him to legal proceedings and a possible lengthy jail term could cause his health to deteriorate and lead to a mental breakdown or suicide. His family want him to face legal proceedings in the UK close to his family.
The ruling is being closely watched as it is the first substantive test of an extradition forum bar test introduced in the wake of Theresa May’s decision, when she was home secretary, to block the extradition to the US of computer hacker Gary McKinnon in 2012 on medical grounds. Her decision angered the US authorities at the time.
Mr McKinnon won a decade-long extradition battle that concluded with a system being introduced to block extradition on the basis of health and human rights concerns. Mr McKinnon was arrested for hacking into Nasa and Pentagon computers and faced up to 60 years in jail if he was convicted in a US court.
Mr McKinnon also has Asperger’s and his lawyers argued that the sentence he faced was disproportionate to the offence and he would be at risk of suicide if he were to be locked up.
A statutory forum bar was introduced by the government after acknowledging public concern about the way extradition works between the UK and US, and it allows defendants to question if their case should be heard in Britain instead.
However, the forum bar’s efficacy has been questioned by legal commentators and it has never really been tested in court until Mr Love’s case, which is thought to be the first real test of the bar — as the circumstances around Mr Love’s extradition are similar to those of Mr McKinnon.
UK citizens accused of white collar crimes in the US have long complained about the extradition process. Critics of the US legal system argue that the country’s plea bargain system gives incentives to suspects to plead guilty and point out that prison sentences are longer than those in the UK.
Tom Hayes, the banker convicted for the rigging of Libor, a key interest rate, testified at his trial last year that he was desperate to be charged in the UK so he could avoid extradition to the US.
Navinder Singh Sarao, the British trader accused of contributing to the so-called stock market "flash crash" of 2010, is appealing in the High Court next month against his extradition to the US, where he faces 22 charges ranging from wire fraud to commodities manipulation, which carry sentences totalling a maximum of 380 years.
Mr Love has previously said he "would rather face a murder charge in the UK than a computer charge in the US because I know at least I would get out in 20 years".
"In the US the evidence doesn’t really matter because your chances of winning if you try to plead innocent are so remote and so costly," he has said.
Earlier this year Mr Love won a victory over the UK’s National Crime Agency when a judge agreed he did not need to hand over the encryption keys to his computer. The NCA failed to force him to unlock computers that it believes contain documents he allegedly stole from the US government.
The NCA said it needed access to the hard drive to find evidence but Mr Love said widely used encryption software should not reverse the basic presumption of innocence. The NCA has held his computers since 2013.
0 comments: