Of course it does. He traveled to defcon repeatedly, last time they didn't have the indictment ready so they waited for the next.
The US most certainly doesn't want to have another ongoing extradition battle for a British hacker in the UK.
The US most certainly doesn't want to have another ongoing extradition battle for a British hacker in the UK.
On my way back, switching planes at JFK there were a bunch of FBI agents waiting in the tube whom served me a subpoena and suggested that I'd be arrested if I tried to continue my trip.
Ended up being dropped off at the courtyard Marriott in Newark by the FBI (after very little arguing they paid for it, rather strange). Stayed there overnight, got interviewed in the morning about things I knew little about.
After the interview I got driven to JFK (maybe EWR, not sure) in a FBI car, with the agent at the wheel demonstrating some impressive skills in the heavy traffic, mostly going around it by driving on the shoulder.
Never going to the US again I guess, not voluntarily nor involuntarily.
That might help.
Member/associate of HTP and Lizard Squad, hacked Linode (at least once), Lenovo, the Python wiki, some game companies; called in a bomb threat on a plane a Sony executive was flying (might've just been a friend of his who did that, can't remember), DDoSed video game services and 8chan for ages, possibly involved with the creation of the GayFgt and Mirai botnets, and much more. Got off scot free because he did it all before he turned 18.
I believe his use of ryan / ryanlol is a mocking reference to Ryan Cleary, whom he hated and considered incompetent. (Could be wrong.) It may have an (unintentional?) double meaning, since that's also the name of the aforementioned "friend" who secretly snitched on him and led to his detainment.
Nothing against the guy. He's intelligent and a good HN commenter. By sheer coincidence I sat in many disparate IRC channels under different aliases over the years that he would always seem to find his way into (probably not a coincidence in retrospect; he just loves IRC). He was very open about most things and generally appeared to be driven by e-cred, revenge/competition, and comedy over financial gain. But some people say he was involved with carding, too. No idea if that's true.
edit: Looks like he recently admitted to (light) carding as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14884487
See also: Coinbase on this month's "Who's Hiring" (flagged)
If they've got grounds to arrest you, they're simply going to do so.
They didn't harass me for being a foreigner or a kid, I suppose they might have let me off easy because of that though.
And I hate to go down a more "conspiracy theory" line of speculation, but if his history hasn't always been on the white-hat side of the line, then his Wanna Cry involvement looks more questionable as well.
Rather than fight the UK on a hacker extradition again, the US seems to've taken advantage of the convenient fact that their target voluntarily placed himself on US soil.
*The core of the McKinnon fight seems to have been the fact that he was offered a chance at a much-reduced sentence if he cooperated and provided information about what he'd done and how he broke in, but on the UK side that was spun as a form of extortion (in other words, rather than a "be helpful and you'll get a lighter sentence" they read it as "fight us and we'll try to lock you up forever").
These extradition fights are largely played out in the media, it would probably have been unwise for the US to request the extradition of another sympathetic character with lots of community support behind them.