Former Soviet shill turns bongmeister into ‘humble superhacker’

The Grauiad cracks me up. Can you tell why there’s a difference in tone in these two articles?

The humble superhacker

“Gary McKinnon worries about the Guantánamo jumpsuits clashing with his hair if the US succeeds in extraditing him.”

“He undertook most of his hacking activities at his girlfriend's aunt's house in a genteel north London suburb, where he would sit for hours at the computer drinking cans of beer and smoking cannabis. He puts his vagueness about exactly what he uncovered down to the possibility that he was "smoking too much dope" at the time.”

Viruses and hackers cost UK business £10bn a year

“Larger firms saw the number of security breaches fall, but the average cost of each incident rose to £65,000-£130,000 in disruption.”

“Small companies saw a big rise in the number of attacks, with average losses of £8,000-£17,000.”

Apart from the fact that the first didn’t count as “an attack” the way the hacking in the second article does, there is one distinction.

There’s only one thing that can cause that sort of lack of concern at the Graun. One evil, nasty, icky-poo thing that makes them normally want to stamp their feet like Yosemite Sam. It’s his inherently evil twin “Uncle” Sam. Bear in mind that we're talking about a paper that was one of the only foreign papers which was permitted to be sold in the Soviet Union, took the BBC's advertizing money, but refused to run BBC adverts listing their broadcast frequencies and schedules, and still seem incapable of understanding free speech:

From the gentle beat of the butterfly's wing grows the meteorological monster of Hurricane Katrina. This can be extended to today's media environment of turbulence and volatility, in which news travels faster and further than ever before. The Iranian president again calls for the annihilation of Israel, and Bin Laden and Al-Zarqawi disseminate new messages on the internet and to satellite TV channels. Events in one part of the world feed back instantly into the politics of another, and linear, machine models of top-down cultural control no longer explain very much.

I call this cultural chaos.

Its roots lie first in the destabilising impact of digital communication technologies.

That’s how you get to the point where it makes perfect sense to magically transformed a 40 year old delusional dopehead (whacked out over UFOs) into a ‘cuddly, harmless’ criminal who’s just a kid after all, and needs protection because he fears being tortured.

Gary McKinnon's search turned into an obsession, an addiction. As he probed high-level computer systems in the United States, his life in Britain fell apart. He lost his job, and his girlfriend dumped him. Friends told him to stop hacking, but to no avail.
"I'd stopped washing at one point. I wasn't looking after myself. I wasn't eating properly. I was sitting around the house in my dressing gown, doing this all night."

Lost in the delerium whipped up over Gitmo is that it's for mostly stateless combatants under whom military, not civil law falls. Combatants who don't wear uniforms have to be handled in some legal way, and the left seems to be tacitly urging the nations of the world to declare pan-islam a nation-state by incessantly demading the deletion of this legal category.

As for our "2600" chappy, it looks like he had been passing the doochie by the left hand side for a while. Being a guest of the federal prison system may give hime a chance to question his need for the rope, but Graun readers are sure to expect him to be “Supermaxed”

The fuse is lit!