Posted on 04/24/2011 9:10:24 AM PDT by decimon
BUFFALO, N.Y. – Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of "pedophile!" and "pornographer!" stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.
That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.
"We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night," the man's lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, "Doldrum."
"No, I didn't," he insisted. "Somebody else could have but I didn't do anything like that."
"You're a creep ... just admit it," they said.
Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I try to judge each situation on it’s own merits.
Obviously if someone got a ticket every time they exceeded the speed limit, then everyone would have lost their license by now. This is why Policemen use their own discretion on who to give a warning to and who to ticket.
Look at the original post to see how much trouble the man is in because he didn’t know how to secure his router. Who would want to run that type of risk.
Would you feel different if you knew that the wifi host was paying usage charges based on packets...
It's hard to imagine a company manufacturing such a crippled device now. The catch is usually that, while the router has security built into its software, the user interface to set it up is obtuse enough to scare off the average user. Kind of like those mechanical five-button combination locks. They come preset to 2 and 4 together, then 3. Of course, you are supposed to set a new combination. But, if you are at all mechanically challenged, or just don't like reading directions, you probably won't bother.
Perhaps someone lucked into a really cheap pallet-load of obsolete devices that use the old encryption standard and was unloading them on Ebay or something. The old standard is reportedly weak enough to be broken on an ordinary laptop in a few seconds.
So I guess we won't know for 3 to 5 years then :-)
You have fallen into a typical fallacy about article threads — assuming that every post must logically tie to the topic you found most interesting from the article.
In fact, there are multiple people commenting, each have their own piece of the article they find interesting, they each make their own comments. Then, other freepers want to answer those comments.
In this case, a commenter wondered why we are all OK with swat teams performing arrests for child pornography. This premise was clearly incorrect — there was no swat team — and therefore the conclusion was faulty.
OldDeckHand pointed this out, and people argued with him about it for a while, before having to admit he was correct.
Your complaint that his correctness is “meaningless” to the story is a straw man argument — he wasn’t making the comment to discuss the meaning of the article, he was making the comment to correct a false conclusion from another comment. You made up a “straw” reason for his comment so you could dismiss it as irrelevant.
You missed my post clarifying that it was really a “red herring”.
I know the police are allowed to lie. Good thing in Virginia though you are also allowed to lie to the police. Many states and the fed that’s not legal.
But why is it ok to tell my family I’m a pedophile? I can see them being able to lie to me, but telling my wife who can then use that in divorce proceedings sounds to be slander/libel to me. I bet it may vary on the state...not sure about the federal level. I suspect the feds can lie to you and even the public.
Wow, I posted otherwise sensible.
Yikes, and you claim to be a prosecutor?
God help the USA.
And don’t just make sure Your wireless is secure. Do not forget your elderly parents!!! They often don’t have a clue but still want to get online all over the house. Make sure their routers are secure. Ask older people that you might know.
There is a fundamental difference between someone breaking a law for which the violation causes nobody any harm, and breaking a law that deprives another person of the free and full use of their own property.
For example, trespassing through a person’s back yard may not hurt anybody. Siphoning a gallon of gas from their car while walking through their yard deprives them of their property. They are different types of legal violations.
Why not hook a hose up to the neighbor’s tap, and use it to water your grass? after all, it will save you money, and if he didn’t want you to do it, he’d certainly have put a lock on the valve, right?
>>Who would want to run that type of risk.<<
I ride a motorcycle. You want to talk about risk? :D
Fact is, I could be killed, but the odds I won’t be. Likewise if I don’t wear a seat belt. The reason this story is news is because of the apparent injustice and because it is RARE.
It’s all about odds and percentages. There are risks that are perceived by the general public to be high, but are actually very low, and the opposite is also true.
it would have proven the old guy working at the ISP wasn't the one doing the kiddie porn and then blaming it on a user. Same reason they needed to get the logs at gun point in this guys house...they need to do the same at the ISP and every router along the way. Just to make sure someone isn't doing a man in the middle obfuscation of the data.
Why did they treat this one router different than every other router along the way?
Too funny!
I’ve got an old Netgear that I should put into use that way - don’t hook it up to anything but let it broadcast away ;-)
I’ve seen you at Starbucks with your woody Allen hat and a pregnancy pillow strapped to your belly. Perv. ;)
Ok now you're confusing me. I thought you said they didn't have an arrest warrant and only had a search warrant. Search warrant doesn't mean this guy was the suspect.
So you now agree with us.
True, but that’s what we have to work with.
How about, “would it be OK for the ICE officers to throw an unresisting suspect down a flight of stairs, as was alleged?” I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one poster on this thread would be OK with them doing that...
>>Would you feel different if you knew that the wifi host was paying usage charges based on packets...<<
First, then they probably would not offer it for free and, second, A lot of this concern by people about my “free” Wi-fi usage is like telling a person he is guilty of adding unnecessary wear and tear to the flooring of a shopping mall if he goes there every day to walk laps for exercise and never buys anything and has no intention of buying anything.
There is just more important stuff to worry about and I’d rather avoid the neurosis.
Most internet providers require you to sign an agreement that says it’s for your own use, so allowing your neighbors to hook up might violate your term of service.
But the neighbor would be fine in that case. A good neighbor would ask before hooking up, to be sure. If you are taking your neighbor’s internet, but are afraid to ask because of what they might tell you, it means you probably know better.
I haven’t seen a lot of action on this issue, but the cable company was certainly very active in making sure people didn’t run cable lines between houses to “share” their cable.
Except for the title...when your lying on the floor with a gun in your face, do you REALLY care what category it fits into?
Say officer, is that an assault rifle yer holding on me?
Shut up punk, at this range, it'll blow your head clean off....make my day, eh?
There are only two kinds of people in the world.
1) People who put people into groups
2) People who do not group people
Which group are you in?
I just helped my parents set up their two new computers and their wi fi network and told them they could secure it if they wanted, but the risk of anything bad happening is pretty low. We did set it up with mac address filtering though.
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