Thanks Carol. I hadn't realised that the early posts above were so old.

An American lawyer interviewed on BBC News just now said that the US attitude to hacking has hardened significantly in recent years and that McKinnon would have been likely to get a much lighter sentence if he had agreed to extradition when it was first sought (2004). Incidentally McKinnon himself does not say that security on the US systems was poor but that there was no security! Just how sensitive was the stuff he accessed?

And would anyone like to have a stab at guessing how he is supposed to have caused $700,000 of damage when he didn't even download anything? Maybe that's what it cost to make the precious data safe, in which case the US owes McKinnon a big thankyou.

The extradition agreement stinks, certainly, but the behaviour of the US authorities is farcical. It is also vindictive.