Gary McKinnon and Joel Tenenbaum

1st August 2009 • 5 Comments

It's been an interesting week for technology related court cases on both sides of the Special Relationship pond, with both the Gary McKinnon extradition trial coming to a close, and the less publicised fight by Joel Tenenbaum to protect himself against a massive fine by the RIAA. Each of these cases highlights for me a different issue with modern law in regard to the internet and how it could be dangerously out of date.

Gary McKinnon

Gary is a hacker. Depending on who you listen to he's either a computer security expert or a script kiddie who got lucky, however he managed to find a way into the Pentagons computer system and, according to the US officials, cause $700,000 worth of damage to it by deleting missile records and the like. Gary has always claimed he was merely looking for evidence that UFO's exist and were being covered up. The Guardian have a great piece on it here.

This case has a number of interesting facets to it. Firstly, McKinnon has admitted that he breached the computer system. However he has also commented on how easy it was to do. This, in my opinion, has lead to a very knee-jerk reaction by the Americans to make an example of the guy who made them look a bit foolish. They're using the 2003 extradition treaty setup by Tony Blair and George Bush which was intended to allow terrorists to quickly be brought to trial, however to almost everyone involved in the case, it seems quite obvious that McKinnon is not a terrorist, merely inquisitive. There is also question marks as to whether the damage he caused actually even happened, since the US Security services wouldn't allow anyone independent to go in and verify the damage, citing it being a security risk.

And so here we have the problem. The US is still a very young country, and it acts like it too. They were embarrassed that someone has managed to breach their security systems and now want to show the world they're still tough by kicking the crap out of McKinnon to the tune of 60 years jail-time.

Yesterday, McKinnon lost his appeal against extradition and has only one more shot at appealing to the British High Court later this year.

Joel Tenenbaum

Joel is a file sharer. He's one of the select few who were lucky enough to get snared in the RIAA's clampdown on file sharers, however instead of accepting their threats (some of which are pushing the boundaries of legal) he decided to resist and take them to court over it. Like McKinnon, he admitted doing what he did, the case was never about that, it was mainly to highlight the frankly witch-hunt like mentality that the RIAA is using to pursue offenders with. By the time the case came to trial, the RIAA had decided that Joel owed them $4.5 million.

Joel also lost his case yesterday, when the jury ruled that he should pay $22,500 for every thirty tracks that he shared, totally to a £675,000 fine.

What's interesting about both of these cases is that both admit wrongdoing from the start. They aren't questioning the outcome, they're questioning the means, and in both cases we're seeing grossly unfair practices being put into place. Here in the UK, there's now a massive debate over the extradition treaty which unfairly advantages UK to US deportation but not the other way around. The file sharing debate has been boiling for a while now, with record companies continuing to 'make examples of' individuals, and continuing to hunt down, threaten and intimidate those who they catch.

No-one is arguing the ends, but we're sure as hell questioning the means, and these two cases have highlighted that. The law needs to catch up with the twenty-first century, and quick, because it's being exploited to personal ends, with laws being used incorrectly or in the case of the RIAA simply ignored.

These men are not dangerous criminals and surely they do not deserve to be treated as such?

A criminal still has rights, but should they?

Let us know what you think to these two cases in the comments.