By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer

LONDON – Britain’s top court refused Wednesday to stop the extradition to the U.S. of a British hacker accused of breaking into Pentagon and NASA computers — something he claims to have done while hunting for information on UFOs.

Gary McKinnon, 42, faces charges in the United States for what officials say were a series of cyber attacks that stole passwords, attacked military networks and wrought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of computer damage.

The decision by Britain’s House of Lords — comparable to U.S. supreme court judges — was his last legal option in this country, but his lawyer said she would appeal his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.

“The consequences he faces if extradited are both disproportionate and intolerable and we will be making an immediate application to the European court to prevent his removal,” Karen Todner said after McKinnon’s appeal was rejected. “We believe that the British government declined to prosecute him to enable the U.S. government to make an example of him.”

McKinnon’s lawyers alleged that an American official had told him he would be forced to serve a lengthy sentence in the United States if he fought against his extradition, something they say amounted to an unlawful threat.

The five Law Lords were unanimous in deciding McKinnon had failed to prove his case.

McKinnon’s supporters say they want him freed — or at least tried in Britain.

Prosecutors allege that McKinnon hacked into than 90 computer systems belonging to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Department of Defense and NASA between February 2001 and March 2002, causing $900,000 worth of damage.

McKinnon has acknowledged accessing the computers, but he disputes the reported damage and said he did it because he wanted to find evidence that America was concealing the existence of aliens.

He was caught in 2002 after some of the software used in the attacks was traced back to his girlfriend’s e-mail account.

NASA had estimated there was a one in 45,000 chance that the asteroid Apophis will collide with the Earth.

But a young German schoolboy, Nico Marquardt, said it was a one in 450 chance, thereby changing the date the asteroid might hit.

The work has impressed the head astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Professor Fred Watson.

“That 13-year-old German schoolboy has done a marvellous job because it’s one of those things that perhaps if you look back 100 years, people used logarithms for this process to work out asteroid orbits and hand-calculators and slide rules and things like that,” he said.

“The process took days and days, but it says a lot for the world that we live in that now a 13-year-old schoolboy can download the right software to do the job and actually find out errors in NASA’s work. It’s quite extraordinary.”

‘Great brains’

Professor Watson says it proves even the great brains of NASA can get it wrong.

“Honestly, it’s very hard to overstate just how good NASA is at this kind of thing, even though they sometimes get their imperial units and their metric units mixed up,” he said.

“But it’s very hard to think of everything and that’s what has happened in this case.

“The schoolboy has thought of something that would actually elude most people, and that’s the possibility of the asteroid Apophis when it makes its close path to the Earth, interacting with one of the Earth’s geostationary satellites.

“These are our communication satellites which exist in many thousands in a band about 36,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.

“That is something – once you see that it sticks out as plain as the nose on your face – but it’s one of those things that you really have to think about.”

Professor Watson says he suspects the only thing that would really make any difference would be a collision, because Apophis weighs much more than a satellite.

“It’s on a trajectory which has a speed rather greater than these satellites, so a collision could make a microscopic but nevertheless tangible change to its orbit,” he said.

He says with this new calculation of a one in 450 chance of the asteroid hitting the Earth, the critical time is actually 2036, not 2029.

“2029 is when it makes a close approach and 2036 is when the big uncertainty is,” he said.

“We don’t know what the Earth’s gravity will do until we pass the asteroid in 2029, in terms of where it will be a few years later.”

Article taken from : YahooNEWS