A British man who used a low speed dial-up connection from his girlfriend's aunt's house to hack into the Pentagon's computers made an appeal not to be extradited to the US in the British House of Lords on Monday.
Gary McKinnnon, a systems analyst, has been threatened with up to 60 years in jail if he is taken back to the United States as demanded by American prosectors.
The 44 year old, who has become a cult hero on YouTube, has spawned a website called 'FreeGary' and has inflamed the twilight world of UFO fanatics, insists that he only hacked into the computer networks to find evidence of extra-terrestrial landings.
He is self-taught and worked under the name Solo but managed to cause more than £475,000 in damage to some of the most supposedly secure computers in the US, including those operated by NASA, the Pentagon and several arms of the US military.
The House of Lords was told that McKinnon should not be extradited to America because US prosecutors had attempted to intimidate him into co-operating with the,m but if the extradition was allowed to go ahead, he would become a victim of an abuse of process.
In an interview on YouTube, McKinnon insists that the only reason he was able to gain computer access to the networks was because they were badly protected by lax security.
In 2005, McKinnon made world headlines when British prosecutors described his hacking exercise as one of the biggest ever military computer breaches. He did the work from a room in his girlfriend's aunt's house in North London.
McKinnon was taken into custody when he was discovered in 2002 but was never charged in the UK. But last year, he lost an appeal in the High Court to stop his extradition to the US.
His lawyer, David Pannick QC, told the House of Lords that McKinnon had been told by US authorities that unless he agreed to plead guilty to an extradition he would face an even tougher sentence. Reports on the net have also quoted a US embassy legal official who said New Jersey authorities had said they wanted McKinnon to "fry".
Pannick told the Lords that the UK court had the power to turn down an extradition if it believed there was an abuse of process: "The US prosecutors sought to impose pressure on the appellant through his legal advisers to consent to extradition and plead guilty," he said.
He said that one threat had been to treat the case as a terrorism case with a potential 60 year jail term on the cards. McKinnon was on the one hand told that if he cooperated he would receive a jail sentence of between 37 and 46 months with a possible repatriation to the UK after half the time.
"By contrast, the appellant's representatives were told that if the appellant declined to cooperate, this sentence would be in the region of eight to 10 years, possibly longer," Pannick said.
The Guardian reported yesterday that a judgment is now expected inside three weeks.
