Felony Charges for Using an Open Wireless Network?
 

I'm not sure what to make of this beyond the fact that the government could probably make a lot of money if they chose to enforce this more strictly. I would also be curious to know how many states have this kind of law on the books.

I don't know that you'd need a specific statute to prosecute this, stealing a network connection would probably fall under most states' general "theft" stautes.

And these cases are definitely being prosecuted more often, at least in cases where it's clear who's stealing the signal (like this case, or if someone drove in front of a house with wireless and accessed it from their car.)

Good ol' Kent County. Doesn't the owner of the network need to be the one prosecuting? Sounded like the owner was pretty fine with it. But I can see something as mundane as the same car pulling up to the same parking space for a half hour or so during lunchtime seeming like a big deal to people in Sparta. Also, I wonder what it means to be the secretary of a bagpipe band. Is he *in* the band, or just their secretary?

I'm troubled by the fact that - after investigating the original complaint of stalking and determining that the guy was certainly not doing that - instead of dropping the issue, the police decided to try and find something, anything, that they could charge the guy with. Especially since the victim of this "crime" refuses to acknowledge that any kind of harm was done.

Shit like this really makes me hate local law enforcement sometimes.

EDIT - this guy was a volunteer fireman for fuck's sake - he saves people from burning buildings, and the prosecutors have to bust a gut to find something to charge him with? I hope the Kent County prosecutor's office burns to the ground.

They were probably bored.

"Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser..."


I don't remember the chicks being that great looking in Michigan, but damn...only 1 "attractive" hairdresser in the entire city?!

Fixed.

eh, couldn't the cop have just told the guy to either go inside the cafe or don't park there and then move on?

sounds like one bored constable.

"Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken"


Hey, there is a guy outside.. he ain't eye'n up our attractive local hairdresser is he???

Who says 'Fox reports and you decide' when it comes to supposedly attractive local hairdressers? :)

I'd be interested to know if the cafe advertised their service as "free wi-fi" or "free wi-fi to paying customers". I mean, there's the assumption that to use the wi-fi, you ought to buy something, but if that isn't an explicit part of the agreement, then I don't see how this is breaking the law.

This is kind of an old story. The TWiT (This Week in Tech, www.twit.tv I think but I'm at work so can't be sure) podcast discussed it about 2 episodes ago, if I remember correctly.

Basically, this is a law aimed at hackers that's horribly worded.
The TWiT discussion on it was fairly interesting.

/tk

wow, I do this every time I visit my in laws in New Jeresey. They live on a farm and have no wireless so we always dvive up to an apartment complex and piggyback off someones unsecured connection.

IMO it;s their responsibility to secure it.

The population of Sparta is 4,159. I could see that.

Maybe everyone has a title.

The attractive hairdresser
The inattentive cashier
The clumsy waiter
The crazy bum

Just to play devil's advocate: Supposing instead of a wireless network, it was some guy's car. If some guy leaves his key in the car, does that make it ok for you to take it?

sounds like the Truman Show

thats just plain silly.

Exactly what I was thinking. Of all the free wi-fi spots I've seen, I've never once seen a disclaimer on the bottom of the sign/sticker (which is usually on the door) that says it's for paying customers only. Like you said, I doubt it's implicitly stated.

Let's say I am a paying customer at the coffee shop though. I turn my laptop on, and my wireless connection shows a "guest" signal that is open for me, so I connect. But turns out that this the coffee shop's network was called "guestwifi" and the "guest" network was from the barber shop next door (don't laugh, my barber shop advertises their free wireless in the store). This barber shop in Fictionland requires their network to only be used by paying customers...am I screwed now?

I've also never seen a free wi-fi spot outside of hotels that specifically said which network to connect to.

Not at all actually.

Although I would probably have gone with "lawn mower in the yard" instead of "car with keys" as an example.

No sillier than to suggest that the law only protects people who have already protected themselves. The whole point of having a law is so that people who don't adequately protect themselves, for whatever reason, are protected.

If you accidently take someone else's coat from the coat room when you leave a restaraunt, that's not theft (unless you realize later it's not yours and you decide to keep it anyway).

I don't know if the signage matters - presumably, when you log in at a hotel or something, you have to agree to the disclaimer that that you are a "registerd guest of the hotel" or something.

I'm looking at this from the other angle. If you're a coffee shop, you want to give free wi-fi to customers, but don't want to hassle them with new passwords every time they come in (or don't want someone to keep such a password for later use), is it that unreasonable for them not to want people parked along the street using their internet?

well if I was to take someones car, or lawnmower they wouldn't be able to use it while I was, In the case of a wireless signal they are still able to use it while I also use it.

And FWIW if someone leaves their keys in the car and it is stolen it serves them right.

What if said lawn mower had a sign saying "Free lawn mower"? :)

This is a reasonable example, but as far as computer security goes, the courts won't ever make a determination of what is a reasonable amout of security on a computer network. You are not supposed to use them without authorization, and you can't assume that the ability to access the network constitutes that authorization.

In this example of free wifi at a coffee shop, I think it would make more sense to continue the prosecution only if the shop owner wanted it. This is technically theft of their service, but educating the guy would probably have been more appropriate.

I think it would be more like someone walking into a stranger's house and sitting down and watching tv because it was unlocked. Its not theirs and they used it because it was unsecured.

Now I also agree though if the owner of the house didnt want to press charges, the police wouldn't bother with that person. Same should be said for stealing wi-fi service.

You could use it, but it probably be slower (you wouldn't be getting what you paid for), and your ISP and the FBI might think you're downloading child porn if the leecher is a pedofile.

Not the same thing. A car's basically a "one-user" resource. If you take someone's car, even for a little bit, effectively no one else can use it.

A more appropriate analogy would be a guy who waters his lawn with automatic sprinklers that happen to go everywhere, including the sidewalk and street. A jogger comes along, decides he's hot and thirsty, and runs through the water that's being sprayed on the sidewalk, getting cooled off and a little drink at the same time.

Now sure, the homeowner's paid for the water, but he's clearly not doing a lot to keep it all on his lot. Furthermore, the amount of water absorbed by the jogger isn't really going to make a lot of difference to the homeowner.


And that's not even mentioning the fact that a lot of cafes use free wi-fi as a way to lure in customers. Maybe they'll purchase something, maybe they won't. But the cafe owners view it as advertising. If, during a town parade, the guys from the local bank throw out t-shirts to the crowd advertising their bank and your son or daughter gets one, are you going to throw it back? Same concept.

Actually, this is more akin to me watching a full movie in Wal-Mart in the electronics section where they're showing off their HDTVs. Wouldn't Wal-Mart be committing some sort of felony by allowing customers to watch the entire flick? (I forget exactly how the FBI/unauthorized sharing message is worded at the beginning of DVD's.)

Or maybe it's more like listening to someone else's radio at a public park. Am I stealing their signal off the airwaves?

I agree with whoever said it above: if you only want your customers using your wi-fi network, you need to be the one responsible for securing it. If you don't have the tech savvy to secure it to only your target population, then you either need to shut it down or accept that you're offering a free community resource.

It sounds to me like the cafe owner doesn't give a shit -- and likely accepts this sort of use as effective advertising. I mean, if this guy was doing this every day for a week, it was massively increasing the likelihood that the next time he wanted to buy coffee, this was going to be the business he'd patronize.

Bottom line is that the law, as written, is overly vague. It's bad legislation poorly applied and needs to change.

I guess I need to steal my internet from different locations so I don't tip off the local cops.

In a diminished capacity. Bandwidth is finite. Whatever you use, they can't.

I disagree. If a wireless network could only support one computer and the owner couldn't acess their own network then the law would make sense.

The last apartment I lived in had free wifi. During peak usage hours, it sometimes became so slow as to be completly useless.

He got off easy. This


should have gotten twenty years at least.

Theft is theft. It doesn't really matter if the theft is on a unique resource. Would a better example have been stealing an apple from an apple-cart? Odds are that not all of the apples will be sold and some will be tossed when they go bad, but it still doesn't mean you can take one.

You're ignoring the part where the owner doesn't care if you take it out for a spin or not.

Yeah, but that's more of an issue of poor implementation by your apartment complex. They likely weren't pushing enough signal to deal with peak usage hours.

That becomes another "if you're going to offer this free service to your customers, know how much bandwidth you're going to need to be effective" issue rather than a "everyone suffers when people leech" issue.

not really because you would also be trespassing. If your neighbor had the radio on and you were listining to the weather on his radio would you be breaking the law?

Yes, but is it really theft? This is about stealing a balloon on Free Balloon Day.

Important part bolded. Do you plan your capacity to satisfy your customers, or do you plan your capacity to incorporate those that will steal from you?

what exactly is being stolen?

An apple is something tangible that once consumed can't be replaced.

Yeah, I don't know what to make of that. I guess there are times when law enforcement has to enforce a crime regardless of whether there's a victim or whether the victim cares, but I don't know if this is one of those times.

I was more put off by the idea that people that don't protect themselves aren't worthy of police protection.

stealing is breaking a law just like trespassing is. In both cases if the owner doesnt care, the police shouldn't butt in.

Not necessarily. Even unsecured, the network owner gets to determin who is authorized to use the network. In this case the cops seemed to make that determination. They shouldn't have made the determination, but they did draw the line in a reasonable spot. I'm not saying what they did was right, but I could see them technically following the law.

Cop: "Excuse me, did I just see you walk out of that McDonald's restroom?"

Me: "Yes sir."

Cop: "Did you buy anything while you visited McDonald's?"

Me: "Uh...I just had to take a leak. Plus, it's McDonald's and I'm 36 years old. Why would I eat there?"

Cop: "Well, since you weren't a paying customer of this establishment and you used their restroom, you might as well have been urinating in the street! I'm arresting you for public urination and defiling private property!"

It wasn't a complaint at all, I was just pointing out, as others have done, that this isn't an item that has unlimited use. Bandwidth is still a finite thing.

that about sums it up for me

So it's only theft if it's something tangible? That's quite a loophole. (Are you saying it's OK to steal a cab ride, to sneak into a movie theater without paying, etc.).

It's obviously theft, but people have to keep this in perspective. Newspaper articles like to cite the "maximum sentences" under the statute, but nobody's going to jail for this (at least not a first-offender). And the defendant has a ton of leverage, because this would be a scary case to take to a jury, who just might hate the whole premise of the charge.

But it's theft, just like throwing crumpled up piece of paper at someone is a battery. It's just a theft that's going to have lesser consequences than other types of thefts.

It isn't a product being stolen, it is a service being stolen. It is also unauthorized use of a network resource.

what if the guy has ural-micatisus?