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Lawyers acting for Gary McKinnon say the self-confessed NASA hacker runs the risk of becoming psychotic and suicidal if his extradition to the U.S. goes ahead.

Edward Fitzgerald, QC, described the risk during a hearing on Tuesday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Judges Lord Justice Stanley Burton and Mr Justice Wilkie are reviewing a decision by former home secretary Jacqui Smith to allow extradition proceedings against McKinnon to go ahead, despite his being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Gary McKinnon

(Credit: ZDNet UK)

“There is a risk of psychotic disruption, which may range on a path from anxiety through to psychosis,” Fitzgerald told the court, as he presented arguments against the extradition. “There is a risk [McKinnon] may take his own life.”

Fitzgerald said the home secretary reached a flawed decision in response to the medical evidence. “She underestimated and misrepresented the gravity of the situation.”

Fitzgerald went on to point out that Smith had not asked the U.S. authorities to repatriate McKinnon should he be found guilty by a U.S. court.

McKinnon has been accused by U.S. prosecutors of hacking into U.S. military systems between February 2001 and March 2002, using his home computer in North London. They allege that McKinnon accessed 97 U.S. government computers, including U.S. Army, Navy and NASA computers responsible for national defense and security, and naval munitions supply.

Moreover, the U.S. authorities claim that McKinnon deleted critical operating-system files, leading to the shutdown of the entire U.S. Army network of over 2,000 computers in Washington, D.C. The deletion also took down a U.S. Naval Weapons Station computer system, causing $700,000 damage, prosecutors allege.

McKinnon has admitted deleting logs in an attempt to cover his movements, but has denied causing any damage. He claims to have been hunting for evidence of UFOs.

“The issue of damage has been overblown all along,” said Fitzgerald. “[McKinnon] does not accept he deleted materials, aside from his own.”

On Tuesday morning, the judges expressed their intention to reserve judgement, which means their decision might not be made public for up to two weeks.

McKinnon’s solicitor, Karen Todner, told ZDNet UK that the court’s decision could go a number of ways other than in favor of the extradition as it stands. For example, the judges may say they will not order the extradition until the home secretary has asked for, and received, formal assurances that McKinnon will serve any U.S. prison sentence in the U.K. Or the judges may decide against extradition, in which case McKinnon may still be prosecuted in the U.K.

If the extradition is given the go-ahead, then the defense will attempt to appeal to the House of Lords, Todner said. In addition, the defense will seek a judicial review of the decision by the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute McKinnon in the U.K.

McKinnon’s mother, Janis Sharp, told ZDNet UK that McKinnon’s health had suffered as a result of the stress of the trial.

“He’s just had an operation on his eye, he had a lump removed and sent for biopsy,” said Sharp. ” There’s a lump growing on his shoulder. It’s the stress–he’s stressed out of his mind.”

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has teamed up with Google on an architecture contest celebrating both the museum’s 50th anniversary and the search giant’s latest 3D-modeling tool.

The two iconic organizations are asking the public to submit plans for a 100-square-foot shelter using Google Sketchup, choosing a location for the shelter via Google Earth, and using Google 3D Warehouse to upload the design and submit to the official Guggenheim contest Web site.

Once a design is submitted, it will be showcased on the Guggenheim’s “Design It: Shelter Competition” contest Web site using a Google Earth plug-in for all the public to view.

The submissions period began Monday and will run through August 23.

Students of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture who will narrow the submissions down to 10 finalists. Once the finalists are announced, the public will be able to vote between October 10 and 21 on a favorite design.

The winner of that popular vote will be awarded the “People’s Prize,” while a winner chosen by a panel of experts that includes Victor Sidy, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and David van der Leer, assistant curator of architecture and design at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum will be awarded the “Juried Prize.”

Besides providing an opportunity to remind people of the Guggenheim’s roots, the contest also presents a chance for Google to show what can be done with Google Sketchup, its 3D-modeling tool.

The winners, whose prize includes a VIP trip for two to New York, will be announced on October 21–the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum, which was, of course, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

The Juried Prize winner will also receive a $1,000 cash award. But that seems to be as far as the winner will be rewarded. While the contest rules allow submissions to include photos of a built shelter, in addition to the Sketchup piece, it makes no mention of building or giving resources for the winners to make their model a reality.

Venture capitalists expect the green-technology area to grow faster than traditional areas of venture capital investment in the coming years.

In its annual Global Trends survey of 725 venture capitalists, Deloitte Research and the National Venture Capital Association found that over 60 percent expect investments in green tech to increase over the next three years. Medical devices, too, offer growth potential, investors think.

More mature industries, such as semiconductors and software, are seeing a slowdown in interest.

“The venture capital community continues to glom onto technologies that are truly ground-breaking technologies and are starting to leave the technologies they believe they have done as much as they can,” said NVCA president Mark Heesen on a conference call.

The clean-tech area remains a favored sector for venture capital investment.

(Credit: National Venture Capital Association.)

Many green-tech companies can draw on existing IT, communications, or life sciences technologies, he added.

The general sentiment is optimistic that the second half of this year will see a higher level of investment after a sharp drop-off in the first half of this year.

The industry, however, is contracting, Hessen said with smaller firms better-positioned. Large investors, called limited partners, are investing less money into venture capital funds, Heesen noted. Meanwhile, investors expect to spend more money outside the U.S. in developing markets such as Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Although venture capitalists are bullish on green technologies, some early forays have highlighted the financing challenges associated with investing in energy-related businesses.

Energy-related businesses tend to require a lot of money to commercialize technology. In the past few years, venture capital firms ended up putting tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into solar or biofuels companies, which is a lot more than a typical IT or social-networking company requires.

The survey indicated that most venture capitalists do not expect to have more money to invest. Many green-tech investors say that small companies and their backers need to partner with large companies, such as utilities or fuel refiners, to bring their technology into the marketplace.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook’s 200-plus million members will be able to customize the URLs to their profiles starting at midnight Eastern on Saturday, according to a post on the Facebook blog. Currently, users’ profile URLs have been structured as a string of numbers. At least for now, it doesn’t look like the switch is mandatory.

This is a move that will help Facebook profiles get better traction in search engines, potentially upping traffic–and give people-search sites a run for their money in the process. For brands whose “fan pages” are a crucial part of Facebook’s marketing and advertising strategy, it’ll make their pages easier for people to access without needing to click around much.

But there’s fine print! “Think carefully about the user name you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it,” the post by Facebook’s Blaise DiPersia read. “If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or ’squatting’ on names.”

There’s something significant here: not being able to change or transfer your Facebook name means that it’s less likely there will be a big market for them on eBay, Craigslist, or elsewhere, something that could easily get out of hand otherwise.

Also: “We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future,” DiPersia wrote. Presumably, this means that you’ll be able to use it for Facebook Connect log-ins on external sites, rather than your e-mail address.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as one might expect, offered no public sense that Microsoft’s new Bing search engine has him pacing the halls at night.

Google plans to review Microsoft’s Bing tomorrow, but CEO Eric Schmidt isn’t losing sleep just yet.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

“It’s not the first entry for Microsoft. They do this about once a year,” Schmidt said Tuesday in an interview with Fox Business Network. “I don’t think Bing’s arrival has changed what we’re doing. We are about search, we’re about making things enormously successful, by virtue of innovation.”

Bing has been well-received in its first trip around the Internet, but it obviously has an awfully long way to go before it makes a dent in Google’s business. Still, with some in the search industry now wondering if Yahoo really intends to compete in search over the next few years, Bing may shape up as the only true alternative to Google.

Schmidt seemed to acknowledge those thoughts. “Google is about getting all the information and organizing it. Yahoo has a different strategy. We think ultimately Bing will evolve to a different strategy as well.”

Earlier in the day, Google Chief Financial Officer Patrick Pachette said the company planned to hold “a review tomorrow on it with the executive committee,” so it’s not like Google is ignoring the possible threat, either.

Schmidt held forth on a wide range of topics during the interview, including:

• Yahoo: “As you know we got within an hour of doing a very deep partnership with Yahoo, but we were unable to do it because of the government and their concerns over various parts of the deal.”

• Smartphones: “This is the year of mobile phones. What we like is every one of these has a powerful browser and every one is used to search.”

• And Google’s new plug-in for Outlook: “I grew up with Outlook as well, which is why we’re doing these things. It’s very important to bridge the new kind of customer, the young customer, with the existing customer that has grown up with the Microsoft infrastructure.”