US says Anonymous hacker Lauri Love ‘secretly infiltrated’ computer systems and faces 12 years in prison, more than others charged in the UK

On any given sunny day during this past summer, Lauri Love could be found playing music in Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, inside the ruins of an 11th century abbey. He’d strap a sound system to a bike, and sometimes add lasers and instruments. “Like busking, but without the money,” he said of his pastime.

As he played, he knew these might be his last days outside enjoying the warm sunshine for some time. Love, a 30-year-old engineering student from Suffolk with a history of mental health issues, is wanted for extradition by the United States under the notorious US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The FBI has stated that he could face 12 years in prison if convicted, though there are relatively few precedents for hacking convictions; the most recent conviction under the act was of former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys, who could face 25 years in prison on lesser charges than Love faces.

The US alleges Love is a “sophisticated computer hacker” loosely affiliated with the Anonymous hacker collective, and that he “secretly infiltrated” computer systems used by a long list of government agencies including the Federal Reserve, Nasa, the Department of Energy and the FBI between October 2012 and August 2013, “publicly disseminating confidential information found on those servers”.

Love protesting at the University of Glasgow in September 2011. Photograph: Jamie McFayden/Lauri Love

The request for extradition describes Love as “part of a community of so called ‘hactivists’,” who seek to infiltrate the computer networks of major companies and government entities and steal confidential or protected information ... and then publicly disclose that information in order to embarrass the company or government entity.”

The US government doesn’t like being embarrassed, and in recent years has cracked down especially hard on people engaging in computer crimes to advocate for social change. Love’s case marks the first time the US has sought the extradition of an alleged member of Anonymous, but observers worry it will not be the last, if it is successful.

We met for the first time in a chatroom on Internet Relay Chat, where I asked Love to describe the nature of the extradition case against him.

“There is no obligation to the United States to present prima facie evidence,” he explained, referring to a controversial change introduced by the 2003 US/UK Extradition Treaty. This means Love will not be able to argue against extradition by disproving any of the evidence in the indictments. “So, my argument in court will revolve around the legal blocks to extradition. Of which there are several,” he said.



“First, there are jurisdiction and venue issues, which is covered by what’s called the ‘forum bar’. That is, investigations and prosecutions should occur in the country where offences are committed, especially if the requested person is not a citizen of the requesting country.”

Love has never set foot in the United States. He claims the US Department of Justice should not have charged him before the British National Crime Agency (NCA) because it is considered a breach of “etiquette” for one country’s legal system to “step on the toes” of another’s.

Love, front left, faces charges under the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Photograph: Beatrixx Kiddo/Lauri Love

Love’s lawyer, Karen Todner, however, says that an NCA investigation against him is closed.

The NCA detained Love in July 2013 and confiscated 29 of his family’s items, including all the computers in the house. One year later, in July 2014, the Crown Prosecution Service notified the crime agency they couldn’t find enough evidence to lay a charge, and the NCA released Love from bail. Love proceeded to sue the agency for the return of the 29 items.

The NCA still hasn’t returned six of those items because they haven’t been able to decrypt them. Love sees that as proof they are still interested in pressing charges against him, and believes the threat of extradition is being used to force him to comply with the UK investigation.

For Todner, the strongest argument against Love’s extradition will be the compassionate one: Love’s mental health can’t handle what he’d face in the American prison system. “Lauri has a long history of mental health issues that are well documented but that he’s never received the proper diagnosis for,” Todner said. “He’s not someone who could cope with extradition. He’s not someone who could face time in prison in America. Frankly, he’s not someone who could face time away from his family.”

Love was studying at the University of Glasgow but stopped attending in late 2011 after he went through a period of homelessness and illness. His parents, a Baptist vicar and an adult educator, had to drive from Suffolk to Scotland to find him and collect him after he was hospitalized twice. He tells me he spent the rest of 2012 and 2013 “cocooned”, convalescing at home. He is alleged to have committed the intrusions against the US government during that period of convalescence.

One of Todner’s previous clients is alleged computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose 10-year battle against extradition ended in 2012 when UK home secretary Theresa May blocked the extradition on humanitarian grounds. McKinnon has Asperger’s, and May determined he was “seriously ill” and at risk of suicide if extradited.

Humanitarianism is not something the American legal system is known for. During his hearing, Love intends to present evidence on the treatment in prison of Anonymous hacktivists Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown. Hammond has served one and a half years of a 10-year sentence, and Barrett Brown is completing a sentence of five years and three months.

“I am afraid that if Lauri Love is extradited to the US, he will end up like Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, who are serving time for Anonymous-related convictions and are being subjected to stays in solitary whenever they attempt to speak out against their conditions - punishments that are designed to break their spirits and institutionalize their personalities,” said Michael Ratner, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

Like the charges faced by Hammond and Brown, Love is being pursued under the CFAA. The act is known for its extreme punishment scheme for non-violent offenses. Hammond received a 10-year sentence for hacking the security firm Stratfor as part of an Anonymous campaign to disclose alleged illegal activity by the firm, but his sentence was longer than all of those of his UK-based co-defendants combined.

Love, who has been loosely affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous, has said he will never go to the US willingly. Photograph: Hannah Birtwistle-Craine/Lauri Love

Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the CFAA is “a very broad statute” that “can be stretched to fit all sorts of behaviour”.

The EFF has long advocated for reform of the law, which it calls draconian. Fakhoury wrote a letter to the judge in the Hammond case advocating for lenient sentencing in consideration of the political motivations of the crime. His letter to the judge was ignored: Hammond was sentenced to serve the maximum.

Love expects that if he is forced into the American judicial system, things will go no differently for him. “It’s clearly problematic that as a direct consequence of there being insufficient evidence even to bring a charge in the UK, I am facing a fate that I consider worse than any possible sentence given in the UK. If I were ever taken to the USA and refused to plead guilty, that number would go up significantly, until it were many times larger than the number of years I have left to live.”

He thinks the extradition case against him is being used by British law enforcement officials to pressure him into giving up evidence against himself and others. Love presents his case to a British court on 10 and 11 December.

When I ask him how many years of jail he thinks he’d face, he replies: “It’s all academic. I will never go to America except in a bodybag.”