Marcus Stead

OF course Gary McKinnon should not be extradited to the United States.
If anything, the US government should be employing him to help improve the security on their computer systems, rather than threatening to lock him up for the rest of his life.
It’s blatantly obvious that Mr McKinnon is in no way a threat to the security of the United States or to Britain.
He’s a computer geek with Asperger’s syndrome, which produces the sort of compulsive behaviour that would make him obsessed with things he finds interesting.
Fans of Coronation Street can compare Mr McKinnon to Roy Cropper, who also shows signs of the condition.
Roy has an obsessive interest in history and model railways, while Mr McKinnon goes for computer geekery and UFOs. The two men even look slightly alike.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this case has been the attitude of Home Secretary Alan Johnson, who says he doesn’t have the power to interfere in this case.
Yesterday, Harriet Harman said that Mr Johnson has to send Mr McKinnon to the USA because he does not want to break the law.
What she failed to mention was that Mr Johnson is breaking the law every day by ignoring the European Court of Human Rights ruling that says the UK can’t keep the DNA of people who have been found innocent of crime or have never been charged.
People on the DNA database include Chris Tarrant, who was arrested after he committed the heinous crime of throwing a spoon at someone in a restaurant.
The police arrested him, questioned him for a bit, and then let him go without charge, realising the whole thing was a fuss about nothing.
But Mr Tarrant’s DNA will remain on the database indefinitely, even though he’s been convicted of nothing in a court of law.
This is fine in Mr Johnson’s book, probably in the name of that catch-all phrase ‘fighting terrorism’.
So if you’re a person who has been arrested by mistake, or were a bit rowdy on a night out and spent a few hours in the cells, your DNA will now be kept for good. You’re a potential terrorist, you see.
Mr Johnson is breaking the law when it suits him. This ECHR ruling gets in the way of this government’s plan get us all tagged, fingerprinted and swabbed, and turn us into the most surveyed and monitored country in the world (we may be there already, in fact).
If he can stick two fingers up to the ECHR, why can’t he do the same to the Americans, just on this matter?
A polite phone call to President Obama, pointing out the absurdity of it all, should do the trick.

While we’re on the subject of the global terror threat, I’m not convinced that North Korea is anything to worry about.
Beyond the facade that the vain, delusional Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il likes to present to the world, is a desperately poor country where very little works, and even soldiers aren’t given enough food to live on.
The regime will very likely self-implode within a decade; they’re a lot closer to breaking point than most people realise.
Even so, I cannot condone the visit of Bill Clinton to the country, in the hope of securing the release of two US journalists currently serving 12 years’ hard labour in a North Korean prison.
Kim Jong-Il is like an attention-seeking child, except on a bigger scale.
Bill Clinton’s pandering to him is a bit like a parent giving a sweet to a badly behaved child to shut him up.
It diffuses the immediate situation, but does nothing to solve the problem in the long run.