You don't find an agreement to deport someone who isn't a resident bizarre? And presumably these deportations involve detention for things that would also be crimes in the "home" country. Would publishing classified US documents violate Australian law?

Not really. If I were a citizen of Russia, hacked the US government from there, and entered a country with an extradition treaty with the US (eg UK) I would expect to be extradited to the US.

Taking computers out of the mix, if I ran a fraud ring from Russia defrauding US citizens of their money, I would expect a similar outcome.

>I would expect to be extradited to the US.

But you wouldn't expect the US to agree to deport you back to Russia as part of the extradition assurance.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know the specifics of whether this is weird or not. Generally, my impression is that in these kinds of cases the government has quite a bit of latitude in structuring the agreement almost however they want because they're negotiating with a party they have no authority over and they're seeking to get something out of it. I'm not really sure I'm following what you find so abnormal here.

If anything, this is an indictment that the US penal system is so badly structured that people have legitimate claims of concerns over inhumane treatment. That the federal government has ad-hoc legal workarounds they can employ is likely a feature & not a bug at this point. It lets us keep this medieval system as the stick which puts us in more favorable situations generally for negotiating extraditions. I'm not saying this is good or a just system. I'm just saying that, without hearing arguments from legal experts, this doesn't seem out of the ordinary & I could see how we've rationally arrived at the status quo.

Its actually more akin to being a french citizen hacking germany from thailand.

France and Germany are alies, both want to see said citizen punished. On completion of jail time the person would be deported anyway, so why not cut out a few steps and make the whole thing go a lot smoother. A bit of diplomacy behind the scenes to set it up saves years of back and forth defending their citizens rights while they are in jail in a foreign country, especially with high profile cases.

Australia have attempted this many times, bali nine for example, where they offered to jail them in australia, offered to pay life in prison costs, offered prisoner swaps, etc.

How long does he have left to serve?

The clock hasn't started. He is not serving a sentence. He is being held as a flight risk pending the US government's extradition appeal.