THE Scottish mother of Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who yesterday lost his appeal against extradition to the United States, is terrified her son will now die in prison.
Mr McKinnon, 42, described as the "biggest military hacker of all time", faces up to 70 years in jail if convicted in the US of sabotaging vital defence systems.
He was never charged in Britain after admitting accessing 96 US military and Nasa com
puters, but a US extradition request was granted in 2006 and the House of Lords yesterday rejected his plea to overturn that.
Lawyers for Mr McKinnon, who was born in Glasgow but lives in Enfield, north London, pointed out that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay as a terrorist suspect – despite his insistence that he had accessed military computers looking for information about UFOs.
Last night, his mother, Janis Sharp, 59, a composer and musician, said her unemployed son had burst into tears when told the news.
She said: "I am terrified, absolutely terrified, that he will be locked up for 60 or 70 years for a crime that would get him community services or, at the most, two years in Britain.
"We are all very upset, as this is our worst nightmare. Had he murdered someone or raped someone, I could understand such a sentence, but for hacking into a computer?
"He has been an idiot, a fool, for doing what he did, but does he deserve to die in a US prison, or 'fry' as they said he might, because he used a dial-up computer to look for information on aliens?"
From the bedroom of his girlfriend's aunt's house in north London, Mr McKinnon hacked into 96 computers between 2001 and 2002. He never denied he had wandered around the computer networks of a wide number of US military institutions. But he always maintained he was motivated by curiosity and that he managed to get into them only because of lax security.
He is accused of using his computer skills to gain access to 53 US army computers, including those used for national defence and security, 26 US navy computers, including those at US Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey, which is responsible for replenishing munitions and supplies for the Atlantic fleet, 16 Nasa computers and one US defence department computer.
Mark Summers, representing the US government, previously told a court that Mr McKinnon's hacking had been "intentional and calculated to influence and affect the US government by intimidation and coercion".
Mr McKinnon lost his High Court case last year and went to the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. There, David Pannick, QC, representing him, said his extradition would be an abuse of proceedings.
The hacker had been warned by the US authorities that he faced a life sentence rather than a couple of years in jail unless he agreed to plead guilty and accept extradition. Without his co-operation, the authorities said, the case could be treated as one of terrorism. It has been reported that US prosecutors wanted to "see him fry".
McKinnon insisted he had been motivated by curiosity and was looking for evidence that the US government had information on UFOs.
His supporters say he is being made a scapegoat for security shortcomings on US military networks. His mother agrees. "They had no passwords or firewalls," Mrs Sharp said. "They are embarrassed, and that is why they are going after him."
