I have to say – this does actually sound like sense prevailing in a US extradition hearing, for once. As an aside, if they say a simple bit of malware on a student laptop is enough to compromise a university's domain and need a $5,000 cleanup, then the IT department is basically admitting criminal negligence...
British voyeur escapes US extradition over 770 cases of webcam malware
A grandfather who admitted secretly infecting people's laptops with webcam-activating malware so he could spy on them will not be extradited to the US – thanks in part to the UK's so-called "forum bar". Christopher Taylor, 57, who "confessed to disguising malware as recognisable and legitimate computer programs", installed …
COMMENTS
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Sunday 13th December 2020 19:51 GMT needmorehare
Back in 2012, they probably were doing their best
You have to remember Windows 7 was practically brand new and no college would have been stupid enough at the time to touch Vista with a barge pole. Folks ultimately either ran XP or 7, even if they had Software Assurance with one OS being too new and the other being too old (but still receiving patches until 2014).
Windows XP systems had a security design so broken that key system services ran in the same graphical session as the end user. That made it trivial for malware to elevate to SYSTEM through what are known as Shatter Attacks. Also, XP shipped without ways to ensure remote access was guaranteed to be Kerberos protected, meaning pass-the-hash was far easier to pull off. In addition to all this, on XP, if you were doing legit sysadmin stuff, there was no protection to stop a keylogger slurping your admin account details when you do Run As from within a user session (unlike with Vista and onwards).
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Saturday 12th December 2020 18:05 GMT Blazde
Re: Stay At Home
Aye, but this is something separate from usual autism causes criminality claims (for which actual statistical evidence is lacking).
Instead it's a general claim that people at risk of suicide should be treated differently by the criminal justice system. Something similar has happened in the UK disability benefits system where there's reluctance to refuse benefits to people at risk of suicide, following a very large of number of instances of suicide following refusal.
It's a tricky dilemma because treating people differently by allowing suicide threat to be a get out of jail free card is unjust, but so is inflicting typical punishments on individuals when you know they'll have unusual consequences out of all proportion to the intended punishment.
So an autism diagnosis gets used as evidence for increased suicide risk and that's not totally unreasonable, but there are many, many other risk factors for suicide. Some much bigger ones than autism. The gold standard for suicide risk is past suicide attempts but if that's the only metric used in these instances there's a danger it incentivises suicide attempts in pre-trial detention for example.
I have a feeling this issue will run and run over the coming decades, and risks politicising mental health in general and provoking a backlash against all the gains in awareness and compassion in recent years. Ugh.
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Sunday 13th December 2020 19:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Stay At Home
Absolutely. My main hope is that improving science allows mental illness diagnosis to start to move from an psychiatrist forming a necessarily qualitative opinion onto a more objective assessment of etiology and sequelae. This would help to depoliticise this type of thing.
With things like wider availability and sophistication of interpretation of fMRI and improving understanding of the (very complex) genetic underpinnings it's not impossible this might start to happen over the next decade or two.
As someone with a severe mental illness who denied it for years, was misdiagnosed with the wrong one for many more, hence and then took another years to get onto the right drugs - which took over a decade - IMO the main problem is less people feigning a diagnosis to escape prison etc. than not getting the one they need. There are many people imprisoned who should be under treatment instead, which would benefit both society and individual.
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Saturday 12th December 2020 01:29 GMT Imhotep
Re: Stay At Home
From the article: Two other medical experts, however, rejected the diagnosis – one of whom was also retained by Taylor's legal team. District Judge Fanning sided with the two, noting that Baron-Cohen had declared that Taylor suffered from autism on the basis of "a single questionnaire and single interview with the patient".
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Sunday 13th December 2020 19:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Stay At Home
It is also extremely common for US courts to refuse extradition for people that committed crimes while at the time not present in the country that is requesting it.
That is 0 people in the last 10 years have been. There is only a chance if the person was in the country committing the crime. So if this case was reversed, it would be a no to extradition. As the crime happened in the US, as he was present there at the time of the crime.
That is uneven.
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Saturday 12th December 2020 18:06 GMT Cederic
Re: Stay At Home
In fairness there was no conflation of autism with criminality. Whether he's autistic or not does not factor into whether he committed a crime or not.
There was a diagnosis of autism, and autism increases suicide risk - the average life expectancy of autistic people is astonishingly low and a major cause of premature death is suicide.
That's relevant when determining extradition to the US, particularly in the face of suicide threat.
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Monday 14th December 2020 16:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Stay At Home
It's got nothing to do with linking (or conflating) autism to causing criminal behaviour but everything to do with the increasing number of criminals using autism or other mental health "issues" as an excuse for their offending when they don't suffer from anything other than being criminals with no regard for other people's rights.
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Friday 11th December 2020 20:18 GMT Claptrap314
Need some journalism, I think...
"(a student's laptop infected with the malware compromised the domain, costing admins $5,000 to clean it up)"
That's as inflated a number for a computer crime as I've heard since the 80s. Seriously, a factory reset & reinstall takes 15 minutes of hands-on work, tops.
Now, if they did a forensic investigation, (which they should), certainly, that would take some work. But that's not the cost of cleaning it up.
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Saturday 12th December 2020 18:05 GMT doublelayer
Re: Only pervy malware not killing
That is really not how international law works. This is not the decision of the U.S. alone; it is also the decision of British courts. While the U.S. could have complied, and I would prefer that they did, the U.K.'s high court concluded that extradition treaties do not place that requirement, just as they don't place a requirement on the U.K. to comply in this case. Each request from extradition is constrained by various limits, including each country's permission to decide they just don't want to comply. In the case you reference, there is the additional issue of diplomatic immunity, for which the relevant law provides. You will likely be happy to know that the law has been adjusted to remove some of those protections should this ever happen again, and I think that adjustment was a good idea, but it would not be legal under the law of the U.K. to apply this new law to the old situation. It is unfortunate, but it shouldn't be the everlasting excuse that prevents unrelated cases from proceeding.
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Sunday 13th December 2020 04:44 GMT veti
Re: Only pervy malware not killing
Diplomatic immunity is not and never has been, realistically, negotiable.
The UK can, of course, repudiate its extradition treaty with the US, become a safe haven for American criminals. If you think that sounds like a good idea, go ahead and campaign for it. Short of that, though, we should all hope that courts will continue to apply the law with some show of honesty and impartiality.
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Saturday 12th December 2020 18:05 GMT amanfromMars 1
Those Remote Access Trojans can be very convenient
His crimes were committed between 2012 and 2015, with the US extradition request first having been made in February 2016 after Taylor's IP address was traced back to Britain. For reasons not explained in the judgment, he was not arrested until September 2019.
That smells of a dead skunk in the middle of the road stinking to high heaven. In those "lost" years was his crime "helping with police enquiries"? Such then speaks of grooming and entrapment, which as y'all know, or should all know by now, is de rigeur of law enforcement and state security services pretty much everywhere and anywhere nowadays.