Dear Harriet Harman MP,
My name is Mustafa Al-Bassam and I am a member of your constituency in Southwark. As a teenager I was charged in the UK with computer hacking offences and was sentenced to 320 hours of community service and a suspended sentence of 20 months.
I am now a 21 year old reformed and productive member of society who has just completed a computer science degree at King's College London, and I have recently accepted an offer to do a PhD at University College London funded by the newly government-formed Alan Turing Institute. I also work part time in Canary Wharf as a technology advisor for an international payments processing company.
The focus of this letter however is not about me, but my friend Lauri Love who is a British citizen that is being pursued by the FBI in the United States of America for alleged computer hacking offences, despite not being charged in the UK.
Mr Love is an engineering university student and computer scientist from Stradishall in the UK. He is facing potential ex