Don’t send our Asperger’s son to die in a US prison
Lauri is the church minister’s son facing 99 years for hacking into FBI computers. Here, in their first interview, he and his parents insist he’s been foolish, not criminal – and that extradition would be a death sentence
FOR an exceptionally bright young man, Lauri Love can be — to borrow the words of his father, the Reverend Alexander Love — rather ‘an idiot’. As for his mother Sirkka, on the one hand she wants to ‘throttle’ her 31year-old son, while on the other she wants to ‘hold him and never let him go’. ‘I can’t imagine life without him,’ she says. But imagine it she must. Today, Lauri, who suffers from a severe form of Asperger syndrome, faces extradition to the United States to stand trial for alleged cyber crimes against the U.S. government.
Four years ago, during a lengthy period of depression, this slightly built computer geek spent months on end in his dressing gown at his family’s modest home near Newmarket allegedly threatening U.S. security.
According to U.S. authorities, Lauri, a key figure in a sophisticated gang of hackers, targeted some of their most august agencies, including the Federal Reserve, the FBI and Nasa. But no evidence has been presented.
‘Hacking into a system sounds like something from the Mission Impossible film,’ Lauri says. ‘ But these were acts of prankery at worst. Nothing disruptive was done.
‘On one U.S. government website, hackers made it possible to play a game of Asteroids — an Eighties arcade game — which made bits of the page disappear. Nothing was deleted. It was all presented in quite a harmless, fun way.’
Not as far as the U.S. authorities are concerned. They claim that Lauri was part of a criminal network specialising in computer intrusions and that huge amounts of data were stolen.
Two weeks ago, at Westminster Magistrates’ Court, District Judge Nina Tempia agreed with the U.S. government that Lauri, who refused to hand over his encryption keys (algorithms used for scrambling and unscrambling data) and passwords following his arrest at his parents’ home in Stradishall, Suffolk, in 2013, should be extradited to the States. There he faces the possibility of three separate trials in different jurisdictions and a maximum prison sentence of 99 years.
If found guilty of the same crimes in Britain, he would expect to serve no longer than two years.
‘These guys [his parents] are a bit more distraught than me,’ says Lauri, speaking for the first time since the ruling. I don’t think I’ve actually processed it yet.
‘I get glimpses periodically and then it hits me quite hard. I’m letting it in slowly, because if I let it in all at once I’d become hugely depressed.’
Lauri says this in a matter- of-fact tone many of us may use when talking about a visit to the dentist.
‘I’m back at [Suffolk] University this week,’ says Lauri, who is in his second year of a degree in electrical engineering. ‘ There are moments when I just feel the futility of it. What’s the point? I’m not going to finish this course.
‘Now I’ve got a girlfriend. We were just having the kind of conversation you have when you’re in love and I was thinking: “I’ll need to push her away because she’ll be very upset if I get kicked out…” ’
The sentence peters out as Lauri reddens and is suddenly overwhelmed by the most heart-rending silent sobs. He clenches his fists; gathers himself.
‘I’ve been suicidal,’ he says. ‘For me, it begins with hopelessness and tiredness. I will hear a voice in my head saying: “You’re tired. You can’t do this. You just want to go to bed and stay in bed.” From there it progresses to imagining a constriction around the neck or having thoughts when you walk over bridges…’
He stops. Fiddles with a sheet of paper which he is crafting into a rose. Origami, he says, is a coping mechanism to help contain his anxiety. When he’s not folding paper, he’s clawing at his face, arms and legs, which are a mass of bloody scabs.
His father, a Baptist minister and prison chaplain, shakes his head.
‘This is just beyond me,’ says the Reverend Love, 63. ‘ You don’t extradite somebody for this sort of thing. It’s disproportionate.
‘One Cambridge academic described Lauri’s crime as the equivalent of spray-painting graffiti.
‘In my private prayers I’ve asked God what he’s up to because I can’t understand why this is happening to my lovely, wonderful, beautiful son.
‘He should be out in the world with maybe a couple of kids and a wife. Instead, because of his mental health, he’s here with us. Lauri is a difficult person to nurture and love, but between us we manage. He’s not an evil criminal. He’s an idiot who’s done something reckless. We didn’t realise he had Asperger’s. With hindsight, some things make sense.’
Incredibly, given the tell-tale signs — at this stage of our interview Lauri is clawing away at his flesh — this troubled young man was only tested for Asperger’s after his arrest. Indeed, it was at the suggestion of his lawyer that he was finally tested in 2014. Examined by Simon Baron-Cohen, the UK’s leading expert in the field, Lauri was declared to be at the extreme end of the spectrum.
It was a diagnosis that blindsided his loving, if hopelessly naive, parents.
‘Having Lauri was like having a bedside lamp that was so bright that if the curtains were open it would light up the world outside,’ explains the Reverend Love. ‘I was dazzled by him.
‘What I didn’t realise was that, like a wonky lamp, if there’s something wrong with the wiring and you move the table, the light goes out.
‘We didn’t notice the times it went out because we were so dazzled by the brightness of it at other times.’
One thing seems certain: while Lauri can be obsessive, opinionated and, at times, downright impossible, he doesn’t seem to have a bad bone in his body. Certainly, he wishes no ill on the world. It’s just that, given his Asperger’s, it’s a world he sees differently to the rest of us.
‘I have a brain that gets on with computers because they’re ordered and they make sense,’ he says. ‘They’re not capricious and changing, as human beings are.
‘Anything that involves people involves an amount of trying to activate your brain to have the right responses. I can be very sociable for short periods of time, then it becomes harder and harder.’
Indeed, when I meet Lauri at the door of his family home in the shadow of the Suffolk prison where his father works as chaplain, his grip is firm and his smile broad. Yet as the interview progresses his eye contact drops.
Instead, he concentrates upon the origami rose. When the rose is finished he resorts to shredding his flesh.
‘For most of my life, the internet has been a help. It’s how I relate to the world on an intellectual level. I can have conversations with people that I can’t have in real life. People usually have better things to do than sit in a room talking to me.’
Much as Lauri’s parents — his mother is Finnish — undoubtedly love their son, they are not the type to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Or as the Reverend puts it: ‘Finnish people are very self-contained.’
Lauri was their first biological child (they adopted three boys before he was born). Sirkka then went on to have a daughter. Lauri’s childhood was centred around the church, set meal times and a fascination with computers. He began playing on his father’s computer at the age of three or four. By nine years old, he was writing programs for it.
‘Lauri was exceptionally gifted,’ says the Reverend. ‘I believed — and I still do — that he was one of those rare individuals who comes along who has an intellect that is truly brilliant. As far as I was concerned he had a duty to take this ability and do something great.’
Many Asperger’s sufferers are similarly bright. They are also prone to depression and anxiety, particularly when their routine is threatened.
When the family moved from Lauri’s childhood home in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, to Lowestoft, Suffolk, Lauri was so disturbed that his hair fell out.
When at 18, Lauri went to Finland to do his National Service (he has
Overwhelmed, his body is racked by heart-rending sobs
dual nationality) he fell into a depression and came home. Similarly, when he enrolled at Nottingham University to study computer science he lasted less than a term.
‘I started to get scared,’ he says. ‘Something didn’t seem right. It was very “lads on tour”. I tried that. I try to do everything that other people do but I didn’t fit in too well.
‘I became quite physically ill. I got glandular fever and had to be taken back home. I became despondent. It’s a sense of the overwhelming meaningless of everything and the inability to muster up enough energy to care to get dressed, to get up, to go out, to do things — engage with studies or people. It’s a feeling that you’re worthless.’
Over the next year, the Reverend Love and his wife put their son back together with three square meals a day, the church and their relentless support.
After returning to Finland to finish his National Service in voluntary work, in 2009 Lauri attempted to resume his studies at Glasgow University.
‘My problem was I would talk in lectures and people didn’t like that,’ he says. ‘I felt I had to engage with the lecturers.
‘I was a bit full of myself and I wore silly hats, so I was vocal, conspicuous and probably sounded like I thought I was very clever.’
Rejected by his fellow students, Lauri began to forge friendships with the discontented, and increasingly found himself swept up in political activism, notably with the anti- capitalism Occupy Glasgow movement. ‘The primary issue was to remove the toxic influence of money from politics,’ he says.
‘I don’t think many of the aims were achieved. Looking back, it didn’t end well for me.’
When Lauri’s parents rescued him from Glasgow in the summer of 2012, they found that he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown. ‘We went to pick him up from his flat to bring him back to live with us and had to take all his books to the secondhand book shop,’ says the Reverend Love.
‘Lauri was in tears because he thought his whole academic life was a failure.’
Back at home, Lauri retreated to his bedroom and his computer.
‘I still had the internet and I’ve always had the internet.
‘I don’t think my thinking process at the time was particularly rational. I had nothing left to live for. I couldn’t foresee a future for myself in any meaningful way. The only thing I had that was remotely meaningful was technology.
‘ When you’re trying to give yourself something so you don’t kill yourself, the prospect of being prosecuted is not at the forefront of your mind.’
And so it was that the Loves had just returned from work on October 25, 2013, when officers from the National Crime Agency arrived at the door to arrest their son. The Reverend Love was beside himself.
‘My angina kicked in because it was really too much for me to handle,’ he says. ‘I was in tears. I was in so much pain. I needed to get out into the garden for fresh air but they said I couldn’t leave because it’s a crime scene.
‘They searched the house for six hours and I just thought, “What’s he done?” Then when they took him away in handcuffs...’ He pauses. ‘It was a silly little thing. I said, “Can I give him some biscuits to take with him so he has something to eat?”
‘They said, “No”. That’s when it hit me: I could do nothing for my son.’ His distress is palpable. ‘I said, “What’s going to happen?”
‘They said he’d be held overnight and questioned and that it was a computer crime. I thought, “The boy’s been pratting around”. I didn’t realise it was the American government at that point.’
Lauri’s case is strikingly similar to that of fellow hacker and Asperger’s sufferer Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the U.S. was blocked in 2012 by then Home Secretary Theresa May amidst fears he would kill himself.
Following the Daily Mail’s lengthy campaign, the extradition law — which had been sloppily drafted after 9/11, making it easier for Americans to extradite British citizens than the other way round — was changed to redress the imbalance.
The new rules, introduced in October 2013, meant no Briton would be sent to the U.S. without the authority of a British judge.
Lauri’s was the first test case of the new law. However, seeing this young man before me, it’s impossible not to feel that the law has been shown to be woefully lacking.
By now, Lauri has pushed up his trouser legs and is clawing away at the flesh on his legs. He is clearly upset by his father’s anguish.
‘How will we cope with Lauri in prison so far away?,’ says the Reverend Love. ‘How do we cope if he’s suicidal? All we have done is given our life to the service of others.
‘When Theresa May made the decision not to extradite Gary McKinnon, she was making a decision she wanted to enshrine in the law that was compassionate and understanding.
‘So how can this now be happening to my beautiful son?’
‘How do we cope if he’s in prison and suicidal?’