Gary McKinnon

I mean, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, all of these UK prime ministers were thinking about you.

You were this really important case because the you said that the extradition law was changed to literally like right after you did what you did.

yeah this is one thing i didn't mention um we saw a draft of the new extradition treaty through our lawyers and it was written a british extradition treaty with america was written in american english which is kind of a clue as to who's calling the shots and um you know american spelling in an english legal document and also a lot of the phrases

were almost verbatim taken from some of my charges.

So I think it's, um, it's not that there's anything special about me, but it was what I did.

Um, at that time, the American DOD systems were getting like 250,000 attacks, hacking attacks at the time.

If you read the general accounting office documents at the time and still to this day.

So I think they needed to do something and they needed to increase the punishment and they needed a poster boy.

Mm.

So timing is everything, isn't it?

Yeah, because there had been big hackers before you, right?

Like, what's the name of the guy who hacked into the DOE Department of Energy and like atomic labs?

Matthew Bevan.

Matthew Bevan.

Yeah.

And so this was like an actual hack on really sensitive stuff by kind of a more professional hacker.

Is that safe to say?

Or also kind of like a vigilante hacker?

Yeah, no, I think he was more skilled than I was.

He didn't just do blank password hacking.