Should Computer Misuse Act offences committed in UK be prosecuted in UK? At this week’s Conservative Party Conference there will be a lot of talk about making Brexit happen, putting the “Great” back in Britain, and taking back control of our laws. However, there is one law where the government is reluctant to express much enthusiasm for sovereignty at all; it is the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) 1990. …
"[...] but the United Kingdom would remain, minus the "Scotland" bit,"
IIRC The "kingdoms" that united were only England and Scotland. So if Scotland goes it leaves only the kingdom of England - plus Wales and Northern Ireland. Wales is presumably a "principality" linked to the English crown. Not sure what Northern Ireland is classed as - although it has obviously a different legal status than the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, or Gibraltar.
'The term "Britain" on its own, despite being generally used as a synonym for the United Kingdom, doesn't- strictly speaking- have any officially-defined meaning on its own, does it?'
When used as a synonym it isn't actually correct. The full expression is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". So Great Britain, the whole island, is a component of the UK, not the whole.
> So Great Britain, the whole island, is a component of the UK, not the whole.
Great Britain, yes; "Britain", though, without the "Great", is generally used to refer to the country. The Northern Irish are actually quite strict about this, referring to the country of which they are a part as "Britain", not "Great Britain". (Whether they say it proudly or bitterly is another matter.)
This does lead to a rather nice irony, that Britain is larger than Great Britain. English, eh?
Just keep it simple. The offense was allegedly committed in the UK by someone in the UK. Any criminal proceedings should be delay with in the UK. We should co-operate with other governments of course as part of international relations so we agree an offense may have been committed by a person here.
Please Mr USA, if you believe an offense has been committed against you send us the evidence, we will review it along with any other submissions and then make an informed decision on whether there is a case to answer. Oh, you don't want to send us the information because of <state reason>? In that case, as we can't find sufficient evidence to build a case to prosecute there is no case to answer so we will not take it any further. Sorry, you want us to send the person to you so you can prosecute them for an offense committed in our country. OK we can do that after you have sent (using comments on this thread) all the US citizens who drink alcohol to Saudi Arabia for trial as they have breached their laws.
I misunderstood I think - alcohol drinkers haven't committed an offense? Well they have under Saudi law. Just because they haven't been in Saudi when the offense was committed doesn't make them any less guilty does it? Surely you wouldn't want to use double standards here. Oh, and by the way can you send all your gun carriers who don't have a justifiable holders permit under UK law here so we can prosecute them. Don't worry, we won't use any underhand tactics like plea bargaining, we won't even send them to jail if found guilty - we'll just fine them and send them back to you - or Saudi if you prefer.
In short the alleged crime is committed here, regardless of who it is against, the person should be prosecuted here. If you won't provide the evidence to back up your claim, go away and stop whining - you do not decide our laws, or when you can supersede them because you feel like it Mr USA. You make think you are the world's police but you still have to follow the rule - innocent until proven guilty - in line with the law of the country where the offense was committed, not where it impacted. we won't discuss how secure your systems were, but don't complain if they are not secure and someone gets access.
"there is an uncomfortable suspicion that public officials in the UK are agreeing to the extradition of Mr Love in order to invoke its plea bargaining procedure and avoid any embarrassing exposure of an inadequate level of security procedures adopted by US public bodies"
what? so if he was prosecuted in th UK , we would be obliged to look at a US websites security and attempt to fine them? or am i reading that wrong?
'So if the US had enacted a European Data Protection law, the hacked organisations could have been vulnerable to enforcement action if their website security was at a level that left personal data vulnerable to hacking attacks. That does not negate the fact that Mr Love committed a hacking offence, but clearly if website security was weak, then this allowed Mr Love’s attacks to succeed.'
That has nothing to do with the case. By analogy if I leave my door open and you pop in and steal something, you are still guilty of theft. I was dumb in leaving the door open, but you still chose to thieve.
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Some of the best hackers work for the largest US tech firms just like the "best" banksters work for Goldman Sachs, its a psychological empowerment mind trick. Do you think its not a valid strategy for the US to be setting up foreign targets who show sparks of genius, knowing that its easy to claim the US tech firms & other entities were hacked themselves? After all, who do you believe the big guy or the little guy? Its the same strategy that works for corrupt police when investigating crimes if you want something a little more local.
As someone who had a distinguished professor from MIT who also sat on the board of a US VC company, insist without sounding desperate, I meet them at Cambridge Uni on what I call with hindsight, a phishing exercise, I thought his advice was odd to say the least at the time, especially as history now shows his advice to me was contradictory to what has transpired in the US with Google, Facebook and other tech firms. So whilst spooks break the laws, do you not think from a military perspective that using tech companies would further the US military advantage even though its disguised as a business? BAE systems is a classic example of a company essentially working for some countries military's. Law only needs evidence and in todays world photoshop works-of-art are not the only thing faked in the digital world. How easy is it to fake logs? So dont be so gullible and swallow the line Lauri Love hacked the US, the US could have hacked him psychologically by building him and other wannabe hackers up just like survivors of whatever traumatic event are built back up, but with Lauri Love, he is also likely to be a suggestible character so other hackers will almost likely have coerced/suggested actions which may or may not have led to him doing things or maybe his own hacked equipment acted as part of a botnet. I've seen so much of this go on, you really cant trust noone, not even your own Govt when it operates in secret!
Catching the spooks since the early 90's on dialup tracing lonely packets back to the BT UK Core at Bletchley. Related to the highest risk Cat A prisoner in the UK who used to supply equipment to GCHQ and has had documentaries made about his prison escape. (Is the last paragraph enough words to have a Milgram like obedience to authority over your thoughts)?
"Taking back control"
I'm looking forward to hearing about how we're going to tear up the other ten thousand plus treaties that control and constrain the actions of the UK government. We may be free of the EU, but what about the ICHR, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, IATA, the G7 / G10/ G20,... hell, what about ISO? IATA? ITU? The list goes on an on. Why should /their/ faceless bureaucrats be listened to when we apparently don't want anything to do with their colleagues in Brussels?
Have to say, I get a bit pissed off with the constant media attention given to Love's autism. Some people have such severe mental illness that they have to be kept under strict supervision, occasionally even locked up, for their own good. (My late aunt was one of them.) Others (most) have mild enough mental illness that they can be allowed to go out and live with everyone else and look after themselves -- and be held responsible for their actions. There's a trade-off: either you're not criminally responsible, in which case you're not responsible for other things, either, such as living by yourself, having control of your own finances, getting a job, getting married, having kids; or you're competent enough to be deemed responsible for such things, in which case you're criminally responsible too. Either you understand the consequences of your actions or you don't.
My daughter has Asperger's. It brings difficulties, but she knows the difference between right and wrong. May not like it, but she knows it. And she's five.
Absolutely. The article makes no sense in terms of stating "on the autistic spectrum" with no indication of what scale is in use and where on said scale the person is. It's such a woolly definition that we are probably all "on the autistic spectrum", just that most of us are at the end were it's not even noticeable in real life. It's ;lazy journalism across all of the media to keep using this phrase.
She likely bases her judgements on right and wrong on a more enlightened sense of morality than the law allows.
In her, and an autistic persons mind, having a look inside a computer system that has an open front door, causing no damage, with no criminal intent, is likely 'not wrong' regardless of what the law says.
Teaching a kid 'this is wrong because the law says so' is a SUCKY way to instill morality.
but not even the best lawyers and judges know all the laws even in one country let alone all countries covered by reciprocal extradition treaties. This is one of the problems facing the modern world that politicians avoid talking about and then make worse with more and more badly (and broadly) worded laws.
"Teaching a kid 'this is wrong because the law says so' is a SUCKY way to instill morality."
Who says that morality has anything to do with it? Teaching a kid that it is wrong to cross the road without looking has nothing to do with morality, it is to do with keeping the child safe. Exactly the same is the case when teaching a child something is wrong because it is against the law.
"My daughter has Asperger's. It brings difficulties, but she knows the difference between right and wrong. May not like it, but she knows it. And she's five."
Only when you stop and ask her focusing her mind on the question does she give you the answer you expect, at other times, you dont know if she is thinking about the difference, with so many thoughts going on and a limited resource ie a brain, can you really say, does she know the difference between right and wrong if she is caught up in the moment of whatever is going on which is dominating most of her attention? You are not a mind reader, you cant tell what is going on in the mind otherwise you wouldnt be posting on here.
This is the problem with law, if you are so heavily focused on something, can you really claim she knows the difference between right and wrong if she is not even thinking about it? We are not operating systems with software acting on Windows event messages. This is why I say laws are a form of mental harassment for creative minds. The law needs to show malicious intent and thats probably as hard as proving Schroedinger cat.
Put another way, if you have a car accident and its your fault and you claim you didnt see the vehicle you hit, should you be punished in the same way to the same extent of the law as the US CMA equivalent wants to punish Lauri Love?
You didnt invent the laws, you dont have a say in the laws as you took the lazy option and wanted to be represented in a so called democracy.
Clever people take from the strong and the strong take from the weak. Think about it...
"Lauri Love is a 31-year-old hacker on the autistic spectrum; he is accused of doing some totally stupid/misguided things and has allegedly hacked into all sorts of places that should not have been hacked"
In that last sentence it should say
"should not have been hackable"
I mean seriously, you've got a guy with a stupid name, an even stupider sounding disease and he hacked your very expensive websites which apparently employs the geniusest of geniuses.
I'd be setting my own house in order, quietly, not very publicly announcing how crap at security I am.
"I mean seriously, you've got a guy with a stupid name"
I mean seriously, you're trying to tell us that (what in your important opinion is) a "stupid" name that he was given at birth is likely to have any bearing upon the matter?
On the other hand, if someone *chose* a genuinely stupid name for themselves, that might be a sign that they're not meant to be taken seriously.
If your family name is actually "Warmdog" then I guess you can't be blamed for your mother not thinking through the implications of calling you "Luke", but otherwise I think this speaks for itself. :-)
That's rather the point of extradition treaties.
Nope.
Extradition treaties are there for when you HAVE broken a foreign law WHILE WITHIN that law's jurisdiction.
If I went to the US, killed someone, then fled back to the UK, I would rightly expect to be extradited. I committed a crime in the US, then left their jurisdiction in an attempt to avoid the law.
If I commit a crime in the UK and stay in the UK, however, I would expect to be dealt with by the UK, not the US. They seem to believe that they have jurisdiction over the whole world, and should be allowed to take them to the US for trial no matter where the crime was committed. Team America: World Police.
(And now I've got the theme tune stuck in my head...)
Actually, extradition treaties, as is the case with all treaties between states, are there for whatever those states decide they're there for. International law is like contract law: you can put anything you like in the contract.
Thought experiment: a sniper in Canada fires across the border, killing someone in the US. Where was the murder committed? Would the US be insane to claim jurisdiction or to request extradition? Seems reasonable to me. (Which isn't to say that the Canadians would be unreasonable to claim jurisdiction.)
Transnational computer crime seems similar to me. Ready access to the Internet obviously makes the whole concept of physical location a bit more complicated than when you're considering, say, a case of shoplifting. You really can commit a crime in one country while sitting in another country. We can argue about how best the law should address this problem and whether it's addressing it correctly, but it seems strange to me to argue that the law simply should not address the problem at all.
We've been here before. In the early 20th Century, some American robbers pioneered the use of cars to commit a crime in one state and drive across the border and out of that state's jurisdiction. The law was updated to address the problem raised by the new technology -- as it clearly needed to be.
Thought experiment: a sniper in Canada fires across the border, killing someone in the US.
It is an interesting one, and one I have considered.
Where it is a crime in both places, I would argue that it should be prosecuted where the crime is instigated (i.e. in Canada). I would expect international relations to be involved, and a great deal of cooperation between the two countries to bring the perpetrator to justice, but the shooter was on Canadian soil, and should be able to expect to be under their jurisdiction.
If we continue the thought experiment and consider a situation whereby the murder was not illegal in Canada for some reason (e.g. a quirk in the law which meant they couldn't prosecute because noone died in Canada), I would expect the US to initiate extradition proceedings.
This applies well to this case: As the crime was committed on UK soil, and is a crime here, the UK authorities should be prosecuting. The US should accept our jurisdiction and cooperate in the investigation. I believe these cases are a failure of our own police and CPS.
I accept that others may have different interpretations, but that is mine. I also accept that extradition treaties are whatever they are written as, but that's a whole other kettle of fish which I won't delve into at this time.
> I accept that others may have different interpretations
Well, that was my point. I don't think there is a single answer to the question. I think various answers are all perfectly reasonable. A lot of the commenters are making simple black-and-white statements of "this part happened in the UK therefore obviously extradition should not happen". I say it's not obvious and the "therefore" is more of a "so maybe".
The dead person might have got in the way. Wrong time and place but thats history, they are dead.
On the point of robbers using cars, and law being updated, why cant we update the law to prosecute americans for the psychological trauma of knowing about their culture or is that not serious enough for some?
Besides if we live in a democracy why should I be governed by laws from a bygone era? I certainly would not have agreed to the 1947 USUK agreement to share military intelligence.
According to UK Law Carr v Carr 1811, once money is deposited in a bank it becomes the property of the bank not the depositor. On this precedent we should not have bailed out the banks using Quantative Easing or any other method, plus the depositors and shareholders of said failed banks should have had a hair cut.
As I've said before the public are just pawns in a global psychopathic game of control. If law is any good then theres no need for the moral high ground. However as the moral high ground still exists it shows the law is not fit for purpose so I say lets scrap the law and start again.
"Which isn't to say that the Canadians would be unreasonable to claim jurisdiction."
Quite. If the action were an offence in only one country then there's scope for debate. If it's an offence in both then your posited reasonableness of the Canadian claim should tell you all you need to know. The gunman was in Canada, the gun was in Canada, the trigger was pulled in Canada, the action was contrary to Canadian law. No need to complicate matters.
"In the early 20th Century, some American robbers pioneered the use of cars to commit a crime in one state and drive across the border and out of that state's jurisdiction."
Your point is? The crime is committed in one state and the criminals flee to another. That, at least in the international sense, is what one expects an extradition to deal with. I've no idea what the US solution was to such interstate crime. The obvious one is to set up a mechanism whereby the suspects can be sent back into the original jurisdiction for trial. If they didn't do that I can see why their approach to extending their law over the entire planet comes from but it still doesn't make it a good idea.
If I commit a crime in the UK and stay in the UK, however, I would expect to be dealt with by the UK, not the US
You assertion revolves around the location of the victim. If it's a US victim they have a right to at least ask and if you refuse they have a right to decide if the extradition treaties benefit both sides; and therein lies the problem of why it's a more complicated issue. If you murder a US national in the UK and the UK says "not my problem" the US probably isn't going to really have a choice. Hell we go much further than that all the time with cooperation - look at British police digging holes in Greece right now..
What if the offence you committed in another country - is definitely not classed as an offence in your own country? Then your own country would presumably refuse an extradition request.
For example a couple could be considered married in their own country - but not in a country they visited. The foreign country could prosecute them - but there is no way their own country would grant extradition.
There is a debate in some European countries at the moment about the status of refugee couples where the wife is under the local age of consent. That could also apply to couples visiting many countries - given the range of local legal age thresholds.
If I commit a crime in the UK and stay in the UK, however, I would expect to be dealt with by the UK, not the US. They seem to believe that they have jurisdiction over the whole world, and should be allowed to take them to the US for trial no matter where the crime was committed. Team America: World Police.
Quite so. However, I have a vague recollection that there have been occasions where US Service personnel based at one of the notionally RAF sites have committed offences on UK soil, and are immediately spirited off back to the US where they remain firmly beyond the reach of the UK legal system. I'm not sure if this is enshrined in the Visiting Forces Act or not but it has the effect of subordinating UK legal interests to the whim of US authorities.
Perhaps this is the hallmark of the "special relationship"; one of the parties (the UK) gets permanently shafted by the other. (The US)
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I know exactly what you mean, so when I'm flying my squadron of Canadian Geese in front of the runway next time and those jets fly into them, whose fault is it? Whilst the public footpath through RAF Lakenheath is now closed to the public, theres no law to stop me flying my Red Robin around either.
Bird strikes are a multi million pound disaster waiting to happen.
What next banning birds near airports or even a dangerous birds act? Innovation comes in many guises, but if you dont want to be spied on by the US stop using US Tech, its as simple as that. Your business secrets are worth more than you think. Just like popup adverts are a virtual version of sandwich board men following you around the highstreet into shops watching what you pickup. You wouldnt tolerate the sandwich board men, so why tolerate popup adverts? Is that not psychological harassment? Ban popup adverts I say they spread viruses, although MS did slip me an update onto my Dell Laptop which stopped them, didnt ask for it, but if anyone wants a copy let me know.... Its a special edition...
"
If I went to the US, killed someone, then fled back to the UK, I would rightly expect to be extradited. I committed a crime in the US, then left their jurisdiction in an attempt to avoid the law.
"
That's an easy one because all aspects of the crime took place in one country. However, what if you fired a missile aimed at the U.S. from your garden which killed someone in New York?
As somebody (I've spoken before on these forums about how similar to the Pippa Middleton case it is minus the attempted selling of information to the press) battling to get the police to *investigate* (not prosecute, just talk to the victim about it) what seems like a cut/dry case to me with the perpetrator known and third party proof available - I can tell you the police won't touch CMA cases with a bargepole.
Still trying to wrangle the complaints procedure of the force involved so I don't want to talk too much about it but.. yeah.. they're not interested unless you're a Royal, even if both the victim and perpetrator are in the UK - so is it a shock they're farming cases out to more competent countries who will do simple follow-up? Not to me.
When is the law not the law? When the police won't investigate.
There have been some fascinating analogies about where the crime was committed, but it seems to me that crimes are being committed in both places. The UK should have first dibs on prosecuting Mr. Love as he is currently in the UK. If they choose not to or the US feels that the punishment is inadequate, then they should be able to push for their own prosecution. Of course the UK has the power to tell the US to take a flying leap, but there could be political or financial consequences to that.
Why is a computer misuse act needed at all?
Example 1, he was involved in conspiracy to burgle.
Example 2, he was involved in posession and conversion of stolen property.
Neither of those actions needed a CMA to prosecute.
If literally the only offense anyone commits is to access a computer system without authorisation, without criminal intent or in furtherance of any other aim, with no damage committed (no, you don't get to claim that those hundreds of thousands of dollars you had to pay to consultants to secure your system afterwards were 'caused by him') what harm, exactly, has been committed?
So how can the US claim to know Lauri Loves hacks were not a premeditated botnet run by a third actor? The US wont publish their evidence so he cant be extradited in my opinion. I found something on my windows machine hiding in the MSR partition, it removed itself but I took photo's of it using an old digital camera and kept them off the computer. I've got the partition loaded in Partition Magic Hex editor so unlike photos taken on smart phone's the actors miscalculated on this one.
Its convenient for Windows to have so many bugs in a moving target basis. If M$ were interested in security they would have developed a secure method to update windows which also verified the legality of the software, but this bread & circus is just part of the charade of the society we live in.
"Why is a computer misuse act needed at all?"
Because the actions complained of are offences under the Computer Misuse Act, not the Theft Act, not the Road Traffic Act, the Trades Description Act or some other random act. The act which applies is that which addresses the action complained of. Is that really so difficult?
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