There was an article that appeared last year in USAToday which more or less said that "child porn" had become the new throw down gun for cops.
Not that they were planting it on peoples computers during the raids but that the dope search warrants were being written in such a way that covered any computer devices on the premisses. And what the cops were actually doing was looking though peoples internet history for ANY PORN.
They were finding pictures of females who it turns out were actually models in their mid to late twenties that were petite in size, small to no breasts and shaved genitalia.
These models and their pictures were appearing on various web sites such as Hustler and even Penthouse. The cops without any further investigation was copying the files, seizing the computers and charging people with child porn.
But once the feds got involved and checked the pics they were found to NOT be child porn and the charges were dropped. But by then the damage is already done, your name is in the paper, mugshot and all under the big caption "CHILD PORN ARREST"...
Its just yet another point to be made that the cops are indeed part of the problem and not part of the solution.
The thing that I’ll NB here is that:
1. With the right tools, a hacker can recover the WEP/WPA-PSK key for any wireless network. All they need is enough traffic and a sufficiently powerful computer to regenerate the key from the traffic. If I want to crack your wireless network, all I will need, worst case, is probably about two days’ worth of your encrypted traffic. The heavier a user of the ‘net you are, the less time it takes me to gather the required amount of traffic to reverse generate your key.
2. Once the key has been recovered, a hacker can either use the network, or attack hosts on the network.
3. There are additional levels of security that people aren’t employing besides putting keys on their routers. People should also hide the SSID, they should lock down the MAC addresses that the router will allow onto the network. Locking down MAC addresses won’t stop a hacker for long, but if your hacker/attacker is jamming ARP and stealing your MAC address, you should see the problem on your local network reasonably quickly..
4. Botnets have infected millions of computers across the world, and the users have no idea what their computers are actually doing. People should close down a great many ports that they don’t need on their networks so outbound connections cannot be initiated.
The best defense for people these days is to not only encrypt their networks, but rotate through a reasonably large set of keys. Crypto keys are something that become both more valuable and weaker with increased use. For people who want a really secure network, they should think about rotating through long keys at least twice/day.
People should also encrypt their hard drives on their computers. While it doesn’t prevent LEO’s from decrypting your hard drive if they bring enough resources to bear, it does slow down the planting of evidence.