The welcome:
The Home Office is to announce a review of extradition arrangements, including those with the US and EU countries following high-profile rows over the way they are operating.
The main impetus has been the row with Washington over the Gary McKinnon affair, in which the 43-year-old has been accused of hacking into US computer systems.
But the review will also look at the operation of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). [More in the full report in The Guardian]
And the downright bizarre:
Geographically mixed-up Algerian hackers made themselves look rather silly by defacing the website of an English stately home instead of Belvoir Fortress in Israel, their intended target.
Cyber-jihadis from a previously unknown group called Dz-SeC commandeered the website of Belvoir Castle to post an anti-Zionist rant along with an image of the Algerian national flag.
Belvoir Fortress was a Christian outpost during the Crusades, as explained in an Israeli government run-down on its history here.
Belvoir Castle, a Royalist stronghold during the English Civil War, by contrast, is best known these days as the host of an annual teddy bears’ picnic. [The Register]
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5 Comments
Slightly confused here.
It’s too easy for the USA and others to extradite people from the UK to face action there.
OK.
But then it’s also deemed wrong that it’s too hard for us to to extradite people from Germany to face action here.
Er. Do we just want to reverse that (easy for us to extradite, hard for others)? Or what?
Gah, they are crackers not hackers! Some of us like to hack; hack our computers, hack our society and hack our minds for the betterment of all. Gaining unauthorised access to a computer system is cracking – get it right!
Jon: yup, I’m using the more common parlance rather than the purist one. I appreciate the point about the difference but my own view is that the English language regularly and inevitably evolves and meanings of words change. In this case hacking is now so widely understood to mean something different from its original meaning that, to me, it makes more sense to reflect that rather than try to reverse matters.
In the Maghreb, there is a significant level of associating Amazigh nationalism with Zionism (both in a positive and negative light).
~alec
cassie: Yes I agree the Guardian report is a little confused. The Ubani case is actually an example of extradition law working as it should: the German authorities refused to extradite Dr Ubani to the UK because he had already been convicted and sentenced (in Germany) on the charges on which the extradition request was made. I cannot be sure that the UK would act so sensibly, since it seems to simply rubber-stamp extradition requests. The German implementation of the EAW system has safeguards that the UK law does not.