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Comment by deogeo | Hacker News Reader

> *according to the US laws that govern freedom of speech, etc.

He's an Australian currently in the UK though. I don't like the global reach of US laws.

The US isn't special in this regard. Many nations have extradition treaties with each other and they are often invoked in cases of espionage. To paint that as US law "reaching the globe" is a bit facetious; everyone is entangled in everyone else's law—especially when it comes to espionage.

I couldn't find any good comparative statistics, but I hear about people being extradited to the US a lot more than from, giving the appearance of a rather one-sided relationship. The treaties may be the same, but they don't seem to be used the same.

According to the UK's Home Office, the US requests more extraditions of UK citizens than vice versa, but that might be due to the relative population sizes.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extradition-reque...

Your link doesn't list the reason for extradition, doing some research on this issue, I see parental kidnapping generates a fair number of extradition requests.

That’s partially because the US is a espionage target to a far greater extent than most other countries.

Well, following Snowden's revelations we learned that NSA was spying on European countries' citizens and administrations, the US president (Obama at the time) just said that spying on allies was a perfectly natural thing.

This is definitely a one-sided relationship.

You can be sure that the US will never extradite anyone for that at least.

>To paint that as US law "reaching the globe" is a bit facetious

'Everybody does it' argument does not invalidate the claim. I'm not making judgement on what should happen here but...

An Austrailian man was just arrested in the United Kingdom and is to be extridited to the United States for allegations of attempting to aide the circumvention of encryption on a laptop (while located in Sweeden) that was owned by the US government and stolen by (while located in the Afghanistan) a US citizen containing information about the United States government's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

1. He's charged with conspiring with an American to hack into an American network.

2. The UK signed an extradition agreement with the US of its own accord

3. Extradition is very common. This situation is what extradition treaties are for.

Well, he allegedly attempted to hack into US computers, right? If a US citizen hacked into Australian servers, they could be extradited from the UK as well.

True. If the hack was related to divulging accurate but classified information detailing Australia's recent invasion and topple of two sovereign nations, against recommendation by the majority of the UN, it would likely play out different.

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