Bizarre Porn Raid Underscores Wi-Fi Privacy Risks 964
alphadogg writes "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. Sure enough, that was the case. Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router."
guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Part of the problem is the downright fucking shoddy reporting in the mainstream media, especially in tech matters...FTA...
The agent identified the IP address, or unique identification number, of the router, then got the service provider to identify the subscriber.
They're teaching the average moron that IP Address = Identity. And as we all know, these morons are the "jury of our peers" when some fucking perv uses (y)our internet connections and we get busted for it.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger I worked as a tech in a major metro newspaper.
Reporters seem to have a overblown sense of self worth. They can't be bothered to go down the hall and talk to lowly "technical" people to find out if what they are saying even makes sense. This seems to happen with reporters at every level. They go on air regularly and make asses of themselves because they are sure they know everything.
You can complain to the paper, but it will just go to a jackass editor that even has a MORE overblown sense of self-worth.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
That story was confirmation for you? Some guy posting on slashdot?
Here is documented proof that it has been that way for a long time.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space [popsci.com]
The background story is that New York time wrote an editorial in 1920 lambasting a Professor named Robert Goddard for writing an scientific paper where he had the nerve to suggest that humans could someday use one of the liquid fueled rockets he was working on to send a machine to the moon. Well at least he didn't suggest that a person could go. I mean that would have been just insane. Robert Goddard had what little support he had dry up and was publicly humiliated so he worked in secret out in New Mexico. One does wonder what he might have done if the Times had supported is bold idea?
Did the Time bother to write a retraction when V2s where falling on London? No.
Did they write a retraction before Robert Goddard's death? No.
Did they even bother to write a retraction when Sputnik was launched? No.
They waited until man walked on the Moon.
Reporters are indoctrinated that they are the protectors of our freedom and that it is there job to explain things to us. Too bad they are not taught to just gather and report facts so that we can figure out what they mean for ourselves.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Informative)
What is wrong with that description exactly? It says IP == "unique identification number, of the router", which is quite precise, particularly for a layman's description, and not at all inaccurate. There's plenty to criticise in OTT policing in raids of houses (WTF do they need assault rifles to arrest a suspect paedophile; why do they fail to consider the chance the person who did the downloading may not be in the house?( - but you've gone awry in picking on that quote.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What is wrong with that description exactly? It says IP == "unique identification number, of the router", which is quite precise, particularly for a layman's description, and not at all inaccurate.
For something to be a "unique identification number, of the router" that identification number would have to be applied only to that particular router and remain consistent. Think about that for a minute. Is there ever a scenario where your home router ends up with more than one IP address? Can you assign it an arbitrary address? Can it automatically be assigned a new address via DHCP? Will it get a different IP address if you move it to another location / plug it in to a different network?
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF do they need assault rifles to arrest a suspect paedophile; why do they fail to consider the chance the person who did the downloading may not be in the house?
They need the whole SWAT routine because they know there's no real threat. Believe me, if they thought the guy inside was armed, they'd set up a perimeter and start lobbing tear gas in there. It's all theater. Good for the local TV and it's like dog treats to the cops themselves -- they get to play Rambo in a safe sandbox.
Re:guilty eh? IP == identity (Score:3)
This is it exactly. IP's addresses aren't people especially with IPv4 addresses. I don't know about the average slashdotter, but on my single IP address are 4 people, with 9 different computers.
If one person fails to update one computer with a zero day patch, and that machine gets comprised and can then download whatever they want, and leave behind incriminating evidence getting someone else in trouble for your dirty deeds.
NAT's are good at such things. Heck I am now tempted to leave an unsecured compute
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wtf.
Re: (Score:3)
Welcome to police standard operating procedures 101. Police are actively being taught to be more brutal, more confrontational, and more militant. There is an active effort by police departments to not hire intelligent officers (average IQ or lower). Furthermore, they are encouraged to not know the local laws they are charged with enforcing. The combination makes for a highly functional, zombie-like police officer who tends to forcefully arrest and ask questions later. This in turn leaves the courts to sort
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4)
There is an active effort by police departments to not hire intelligent officers (average IQ or lower).
True story. A friend of mine with a bachelors in poli-sci and working on an accounting degree after being laid off during the economic meltdown, decided to apply at the local PD. Smart, stable guy, paints, plays 2-3 instruments, well read and travelled. He looks like a cop though, 6'3", works out a lot.
He aced the physical tests, background check, drug screen, spent 6 months dealing with their paperwork and application process. The recruiting officers liked him and felt he'd make a good officer. At the mental health screening he is rejected. I forget the rubber stamp reason, but he was told by retired officers (one-time coworkers of ours at a startup, now beer drinkin' pals) his rejection was effectively due to him being too smart and not a brainwashed stormtrooper.
A few weeks after his rejection a new officer was fired for making harassing phone calls and stalking women he'd interviewed after they'd submitted complaints for unrelated criminal activity. This guys background was way murkier than my friends, discipline reports from his time in the military and such started coming up. Stuff the local PD had glossed over during his interview process because he was a soldier.
This definitely sank my respect for local PD to even lower levels.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the cops shouted 'pornographer!' and 'pedophile!' at the suspect out of self defense. After you call someone a pedophile, they cannot possibly hurt you, according to the Pedophile Code of Honor.
Re: (Score:3)
I suppose abusing someone is also "to protect themselves."
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Informative)
48 in 2009? I wouldn't complain. It's in the same ballpark as mining deaths in the same year (34 [msha.gov]). I think that in most police manuals there's a section about use of force, and sending a SWAT-like group after a guy who is not known to be dangerous is preposterous.
Re: (Score:3)
This did not need a SWAT team. Police are safer now than they have ever been since 1974. Garbagemen have a more dangerous job.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, they want to go home. However, my choices as a law abiding citizen (like the guy in the story here) are to assume it's cops and lie on the floor, or assume it's bad guys and open fire.
Making that choice anything other than tragic is in the hands of the police, not the ordinary citizen. People in their homes have an entirely different class of rights and expectations that makes your traffic stop example not apply.
Clearly, there are situations where going in hot is warranted. However the idea someone apparently dumb enough to download CP from his own living room will be some sort of uber-trigger-happy criminal is just stupid. Someone doing that, thinks they aren't going to be detected and won't be ready for them in which case a polite knock, followed by arrest and seizure of the computer equipment will work just fine. Top that with the large number of outright address mistakes the dumb pigs make, it's ridiculous to think that people and pigs will not continue to get unnecessarily killed when there are mistakes made during investigations that result in this type of entry.
I just hope the pigs don't make that mistake at MY house. I keep a loaded AR-15 near my bed that is fully capable of both shooting through all my walls, but also personal body armor of the police on the other side of those walls*. The idea a law abiding citizen is both harmless and will always know not to shoot is absolutely false. With the behavior of the police in this situation, they damn well SHOULD be worried about going home because appear to have integrated fucking up into just about every investigation. Which in turn greatly increases their chances of getting killed by fault of their own investigation techniques when they cause someone to rightfully defend themselves.
* It also shoots through schools.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Clearly, there are situations where going in hot is warranted. However the idea someone apparently dumb enough to download CP from his own living room will be some sort of uber-trigger-happy criminal is just stupid. Someone doing that, thinks they aren't going to be detected and won't be ready for them in which case a polite knock, followed by arrest and seizure of the computer equipment will work just fine.
The police should be doing an investigation first before an arrest, i.e. find out who lives there, get a criminal profile together. Is this some idiot beating off under his desk for 18 hours a day, or an armed crime lord with a meth lab and booby traps? I mean if he's a child pornographer engaged in human trafficking, it would make sense if he was engaged in drug trafficking too; it's not a necessary or common link, but it's sensible. We know meth labs produce lots of explosives, and meth makers like to set up trigger traps for police raids--the police are actually afraid to raid them.
So why don't you make sure you know what you're getting into first? See if the guy is a cunning, paranoid maniac that likely has an impenetrable fortress of death to protect himself; or an idiot that has no clue what he's doing. Act accordingly.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who keeps a loaded assault weapon in their home outside of a weapons safe, with the ammo locked in a separate safe is an dangerous idiot.
Anyone who things opening fire on people who identify themselves as the police is great way to "defend" their home is a dangerous idiot. Opening fire with a weapon that will easily penetrate the walls of your neighbors home is doubly stupid.
Anyone who thinks they need a firearm to "defend their home" living in a modern western country is a dangerous idiot.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd like to go home at the end of my day too, and unlike a cop, I'm not getting paid to take risks in trade for getting to carry a gun, and didn't take an oath to protect and serve. Cops are, and did.
If you'd rather kill a citizen by mistake to avoid all risks, maybe you shouldn't be a cop.
48 in a year? From shootings? Or does that number include car wrecks, etc? I suspect that working at a convenience store, on a farm, as a garbageman, miner, or cabbie is more dangerous than being a cop. But they don't get to shoot other people or call them pedophiles.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know how many cops are killed every year? 48 was in 2009 over 3/4 of them at traffic stops.(speeding suspected drunk driving, etc)
There are 800,000 law enforcement officers in the US, so we're talking about 0.006% here. Assuming the officer has a 10 mi. commute, he has a greater chance of getting killed on the way into the office or "home to their spouse's[sic] at the end of their shift" (0.007%).
Yawn.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
An arrest warrant... but does it involve raiding the house with "assault rilfes"? (Whatever those are!)
I was always under the assumption that a uniformed officer knocks on your door and hands you a slip of paper to escort you "downtown." Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Re: (Score:3)
Yes it does. That's how we protect "freedom" here.
It's like how the freedom of all Airline travellers is protected by being groped and looked at naked..
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An assault rifle [wikipedia.org] is a rifle capable of selective operation in either an automatic or semi-automatic firing mode and using a lighter cartridge -- the AK47 or the M16 being the familiar examples; standard issue for infantry forces and for stormtrooper cops. Not to be confused with "assault weapon", a political/legal term meaning "extra-scary gun".
Re: (Score:3)
Not anymore. Blitzkrieg raids have become SOP for anything more severe than unpaid parking tickets, and will probably remain that way until more citizens start greeting these home invasions with kinetic resistance.
Which would lead to the SOP preemptive kinetic pacification of any residence about to be raided.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
with kinetic resistance
You're a moron, and your cute euphemism doesn't hide that. More "kinetic resistance" is only going to justify and encourage this kind of response from the police, and not dissuade it.
Call me a bleeding liberal if you will, but the police are more afraid of lawsuits than they are of armed individual resistance. The latter they have training and material to deal with. The former they don't, and civil penalties deprive them of resources to continue criminal acts with.
Re: (Score:3)
So was I. This highlights the 2nd part of this whole case that is very wrong (other than the IP == identity which everyone else is doing a good job of debunking).
If someone was breaking through my rear door as described, I'd inform them that there is a high-powered rifle pointing at the door, and that they will not be warned again. If they hit the door again, they would be
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is today there are clearly two kinds of people: nice, friendly civil people that lethal force is not required to approach and the other kind. If you talk with police much you find out that "the other kind" are responding to a knock on the door with shots fired through it. There may also be various things in the house that can be quantified as high explosives used in the production of meth amphetamine drugs.
When your ordinary police officer spends half the day serving an arrest warrant on someo
Re: (Score:3)
No knock raids are becoming more and more common, even for less serious offenses, and are dangerous for everyone involved. Raid me at night and I might think you're a thief breaking in and defend myself, likely killing someone or getting killed. I could even be right; there is at least one instance of these raiders robbing the accused victims of cash and drugs for the police officers' personal gains.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Blame the SWAT-ification of the police. Tons of federal money for SWAT but nowhere near enough actual criminals that require that sort of response. So you've got a bunch of expensive people sitting around doing nothing; in order to justify their continued existence management deploys them on ever more trivial work just to be able to say they are being used and deserve to be funded next year.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
I have a major issue with this premise (destruction of evidence) because it's easy enough for you to just shut off the offending PC before you go to bed and/or remove the key. If you were smart (and it doesn't really take that much) you could wire up your doors to some sort of destructive device near your hard drives and a raid will destroy that data anyway without owner intervention. If you remove everyone from the house and place it on watch not to let anyone in, the key should be inside somewhere if th
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem here is not that he received a visit from the police, but rather the manner in which that visit had been carried out.
Re: (Score:3)
An IP address enough evidence to warrant a warrant? Do you want me to send "unsolicited" stuff to your IP address? Unless you can at least verify that the IP address "ordered" the packets, you have nothing. If you can, then all you have is that someone using this IP address ordered them. You still have no proof whatsoever that the rightful "owner" of this IP address did it.
But let's assume for a moment that it warrants a search (which it should not, the evidence is about as weak as someone ordering explosiv
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not true. He'll probably still be assumed to be guilty by a large percentage of people even after he is proven innocent.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The horrible thing, to me, is that they're trying to use it to push securing your home internet. Breaking home wireless encryption isn't that hard, and it would have made it far more difficult for him to prove his own innocence. It's a bit of a double-edged sword.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Informative)
You don't even see his point!
If my wireless is open to everyone, and someone used my wireless to commit any non-sanctioned action, I can easily say: It hasn't to be me, someone else might have used it.
If my wireless is closed, and someone breaks my WEP key to use my wireless to commit any non-sanctioned action, it's much more difficult for me to prove myself innocent, because I'm the only one who could have known the right WEP phrase to use it.
So as long as I have a flat rate and don't need to care about the amount of traffic, it's better for me to not lock my wireless.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Why the intimidation?
For the same reason that the SS would shout "Jew" when they were arrested German Jews during the 1930s and 40s. The police are not just convinced that this guy is guilty; they are convinced that he is guilty of being a sick pedophile, which of course is worse than being a murderer. What was the point of bringing in a paramilitary force to arrest him, when he is suspected of a nonviolent crime, if not to send a message about how we should view people who like child pornography?
Re: (Score:3)
While I agree in principle, you're very wrong on details. Most (as in 4 nines at least) of distribution of pornographic material of any kind (legal and not) is done without cash or any other compensation changing hands. The production of the stuff most people download has been paid off long ago. Jailing porn collectors who don't pay for their stuff is pretty much pointless -- it doesn't do anything to prevent anyone from being raped.
Re:guilty eh? (Score:4, Informative)
Non violent?
Ask the kids who have been raped to produce the stuff.
Sorry to break your mental fantasy of kids being raped against their will... you were probably enjoying it.
Here is where most of the "child pornography" is coming from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexting [wikipedia.org]
Teens taking pictures/videos of themselves and sending it to boy/girl friends online where is gets intercepted.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Teens-and-Sexting.aspx [pewinternet.org]
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
Search Warrant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Search Warrant? (Score:4, Insightful)
What? Dude, no. Cops are NEVER in the wrong. If a mistake was made, it's obviously on the part of the WiFi router owner.
Really, I'm surprised that the cops haven't charged him with wasting police resources-- those SWAT raids aren't cheap...
Re:Search Warrant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Second Point: ICE needs to have a federally issued warrant in order to raid a house.
Honestly it is the Judges that need the wake-up call. Too many just don't understand the intricacies of technology and internet crime. A Judge would have been shown how ICE had tracked the IP back to a specific person, and he should have known that that IP address doesn't necessarily identify that person as the perpetrator, and denied the warrant. Furthermore, he should realize that by authorizing a raid like that he reduced the chance of actually catching the real criminal. If the neighbor wasn't such a bone-head, he would have realized what was going on, and fled after he saw the raid on his neighbor's apartment. Instead he probably though he had successfully pinned the blame on someone else.
Re: (Score:3)
Honestly it is the Judges that need the wake-up call.
Never going to happen. They have far too much discretion, and are even immune to being sued or prosecuted for abuses of power.
Re:Search Warrant? (Score:4, Interesting)
I have heard that defense before, but it sounded more like "Befehl ist Befehl". I don't think it worked that time either.
Re:Search Warrant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if he was guilty, there wasn't a good reason to attack him with a military unit of the police because his proclivities are abhorrent. Why couldn't regular cops handle the warrant? He wasn't accused of buying machine guns after all.
Re: (Score:3)
I own a gun and I don't use it to kill people. "Only one purpose"?
Re: (Score:3)
If you are going to let others use your identity (and your IP address is one form of identification), you need to accept that others may do things that land you in hot water.
Bad premise. Since IP's can be both dynamic and shared, there's no way that it should be viewed as a form of identification.
Re: (Score:3)
If it's as simple as pulling the plug when the cops knock at your door, then is it really that much more difficult to pull the plug when the cops bust the door down? If you're a pedophile using TrueCrypt, are you going to "pull the plug" every time your doorbell rings, just in case it's the cops? He was asleep when the raid occurred, so the computer was probably already off.
There's no reason to physically bust down the door in the middle of the night, throw the suspect down a flight of stairs, and basically
Is it that hard... (Score:3)
But, yes, this is an area inhabited by much hysteria, mostly generated from "Think Of The Children" LE Nazis and - yes - the News Media looking for the sensational story...
Guest Wi-Fi (Score:5, Insightful)
...to set up a password?
If you run a business that offers WLAN Internet service to its guests, how do you reliably communicate the password to legitimate guests without also communicating it to those who deal in child pornography and unlicensed controlled substances?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
You don't worry about that, and instead focus on securing your guest WiFi through some kind of walled garden or forced proxy setting to prevent people from abusing the service. It's actually quite trivial to force all traffic through a silent proxy without having to configure client PC's for it at all. If you don't want to go to that much effort, you can also simply block everything that isn't on HTTP or HTTPS default ports, and just force those ports through a proxy.
Just because you're providing wireless s
Re:Guest Wi-Fi (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm curious: If I sing a note, can you sing a perfect fifth in just tuning to it, and create an overtone? I didn't think so. It's actually very, very easy to do, and I can teach nearly anybody who can sing along in church or with the radio in about half an hour. It's all about perspective. I'm not even a professional musician - in fact, not even close.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Is it that hard... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, there was that time I changed ISPs. Couldn't be home for the changeover but the nontechnical roomie was. I left him with two instructions:
1) They DO NOT TOUCH my stuff. Not even to hook it to the ISP's router.
2) If they can't give me a router without wireless, they disable the wireless. Neither of us uses it.
The installation guy wanted to install their "home security suite" (a rebadged McAfee or something) on my PC. He got rebuffed, so instruction #1 went off without a hitch.
The roomie specifically requested the wireless be disabled. The ISP guy said he disabled it. When I got home, turned on my laptop's wireless and checked. And found a wide-open access point that wasn't there that morning. Its name? MY PHONE NUMBER.
And the router was passworded. I couldn't turn it off short of yanking it out. I had to go online (via my laptop because like hell I was plugging my LAN into an open access point), find a list of default passwords the ISP uses, and try them until I hit the right one. I changed the network name to gibberish and then disabled it.
I was later informed that they'd have been more than happy to tell me the password if I just phoned them. The next morning, when the phone lines were open, because I got home too late.
Oh, and wait an hour on hold.
And hope the call center monkey I got didn't think he wasn't allowed to give that info. And knew where to find it.
Sure, it's EASY to change a wireless setting!
But I want to share (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone is sitting outside my house, where there is no mobile phone service, and they really desperately need to make a quick Skype call or check their e-mail, it is a neighbourly thing to do to let them use my wifi, just as if their car broke down, it would be a nice thing to offer them a glass of water and a quick phone call to their car breakdown company.
Child pornography trading was not a strict liability offence last time I checked. You have to show some intent, damnit. And until that happens, I'm going to say fuck you to fear and be a good neighbour.
Bruce Schneier's essay on open wireless (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But I want to share (Score:5, Insightful)
Then let them knock on your door and ask you for the WEP key...
No. Who are you to tell me how to do it? If this is a free nation, I'll do it however I want. If I want to shine their shoes as they use my Internet connection, I'll do that too. It's none of your business how I choose to do it.
Re:But I want to share (Score:4, Insightful)
So rather than (Score:5, Insightful)
So rather than two Federal Marshalls in ties having a discussion with the gentleman, the Feds come in Police State style, tossing American citizens around like ragdolls and trampling the Constitution and the natural rights of man.
What is wrong with this country?
Re:So rather than (Score:5, Insightful)
The voters, even if they remember the incident come November, will still vote for the same politicians they have been voting for their whole lives.
Re:So rather than (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't blame the voters for the two-party system; such a system naturally falls out of our election method: non-proportional, one-vote, winner-takes-all. If you want more than two viable parties, that's where you should be looking.
Re: (Score:3)
And that is the problem. It shouldn't be run at all. The government was meant to be a Constitutionally Limited Republic. That is to say, the Constitution was written to limit the power of the Government. Quite clearly, we have gone too far away from that. The Unites States has decided upon security over freedom. This must change. The question is, how is this done?
Wrong Damn Point (Score:5, Insightful)
"Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale."
The summary is a perfectly accurate representation of how the police/statist spokespeople are spinning this, and of course the mass media just regurgitates it verbatim. But that is totally the wrong point to take from this. It's a cautionary tale, all right -- of the horrifying real-life consequences of our brain-addled priorities towards pornography. And the result is they'll want to make it illegal to share our Internet and information access with fellow citizens. Pretty outrageous.
This is a cautionary tale... (Score:5, Insightful)
... but it's the police who need to learn.
Maybe we don't need to send SWAT teams in to arrest people unless there is specific evidence that the person being arrested is armed and violent?
Maybe what passes for "probable cause" is a joke these days?
cautionary tale indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale
Indeed, this should be a cautionary tale: obtain better evidence before you make an arrest. Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement. Surely our freedoms have built-in protections. Surely we do not need to respond to attempts by law-enforcement to try to scare us into using encryption if we don't want to ...right?
Re:cautionary tale indeed (Score:4, Informative)
"Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement."
Almost exactly the opposite. Thee days, there's quite a bit of aggravation aimed at (a) partial immunity for law enforcement, and (b) complete immunity for prosecutors. (Of which the latter often blankets and protects the former.)
Re: (Score:3)
Wrong Summary Title (Score:3)
How ridiculous. (Score:4, Insightful)
My advice would be "No one password protect your router"
Then all your concerns about the federal government snooping in on your internet traffic become moot.
Having everyone password protect their router gives the state more power over you.
Re: (Score:3)
Hi, I'm Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC (Score:4, Funny)
Better not use WEP either. (Score:3)
Just using a password isn't safe either. I 'cracked' my own home router that was running WEP encryption in about 5 minutes using a live-cd distribution for that purpose. I've made sure that everything is on WPA2 now, but very few home users are going to know the difference between encryption types.
It's not just wireless that presents problems like this. If your computer or router gets cracked and starts routing illicit traffic for third parties the exact same thing in the article can occur.
MAC addresses are easy to spoof (Score:4, Insightful)
Before you know it ... (Score:3)
Remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when SWAT teams were only used on violent offenders in situations that were expected to get excessively violent?
Unfortunately, I don't, I was only born in the 80s. I know SWAT teams as being used for everyday arrests and serving warrants, most often by busting down doors of family homes in the dark and shooting people's pets (like the DC area mayor who's dog was shot in the back as it ran away from police during a raid for a crime police had strong evidence he didn't commit but set him up for anyway). No police force needs APCs. Nor should the first line of investigation involve Afghanistan-style street warfare. And where's the police force policing these out of control police forces?
Very Lucky The Man is Not Suing (Score:5, Insightful)
The Feds could readily determine that the router was unsecured. That means that anybody within a certain radius of the computer could have downloaded the picture.
Probable cause means facts and circumstances that would cause a person of reasonable prudence to believe that the computer in the house that was searched was used to download criminal material or used to store criminal material.
The router is evidence of a crime. It is the device used to get the criminal material. The feds had a legit reason for the search and seizure of the router.
The problem that I have is that the ICE agents behaved like pigs--complete pigs--with respect to the man whose home they invaded. They had facts sufficient to know that they had no probable cause to believe that the man they threw on the ground had done anything wrong. They were under no threat, yet they assaulted him for no good reason.
Actually, it's an argument *against* passwords (Score:3)
If securing wifi becomes mainstream and hackers start producing tools to crack common wifi entry points, it would be much harder to explain away an intrusion if your network is password protected than if it is not.
My only real concern would be with bandwidth consumption and there are a lot of teens in my neighborhood I could see streaming like fiends.
Might as well be open (Score:5, Insightful)
I have lived in my neighborhood for several years. Within my home detection range, I have access to nearly a dozen wireless hotspots. A few are open. A few use WEP. Two use WPA. A few use WPA2. In the course of my experimenting with wireless security and man in the middle attacks, I have gained access to all of them. The hardest one to crack forced me to set up a dedicated laptop for a week. Now, I'm just a computer guy with an interest in security. I tried just to see what could be done and to gain a better understanding. But the tools I used and the knowledge I have are available to virtually anyone. I'm far from some 'super-hacker'. My point is that if I were a pornographer, none of these would be secure enough to stop me. And yet the police are trying to spin this that somehow the homeowner who was wrongfully arrested was at fault for some security lack on his part. Ridiculous. It's obvious that the police didn't have enough information to justify the raid, and they are just covering that up. Can you imagine the police doing a major raid on your house, doing property damage, seizing your assets, etc. then being told "Hey, you have the same initials as the guy we're really after. We really didn't know enough to figure out if it was you or not, but we figured what the heck, we'd raid you anyway."
Re: (Score:3)
So why the armed raid? (Score:4, Informative)
Downloading child pornography doesn't seem to be a violent crime to me. Why did they need to send a SWAT style raid rather than knocking on the door with a warrant? Did the guy have a history of violent crime?
Aggresive raids get people killed - both the people being raided (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012602136.html [washingtonpost.com]) and the police doing the raid (e.g. http://amarillo.com/stories/112201/tex_firedfor.shtml [amarillo.com] - note that was a raid of someone who owned a lot of guns, but the police did manage to fire 369 shots killing one of their own while the guy being raided did not touch a gun let alone fire a single shot).
For suspects of non-violent crimes (and downloading/viewing child pornography is not more violent than downloading/viewing videos of an assault - that the production of the pornography involves violence is irrelevant) and even for convicted non-violent criminals "kicck the door down and point guns at everyone" raids are only going to increase the risk of death and injury.
Advice (Score:3)
> Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him...
> Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.
I have some advice for law enforcement. Don't treat someone suspected of a non-violent crime as an excuse to play with all the new weapons you just got budget for. Things go wrong. People end up dead. Read http://reason.com/archives/2007/07/02/our-militarized-police-departm [reason.com] or http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 [cato.org] or Google for "Paramilitary raids", "militarized police".
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it's easy for you, Mr. "I Compiled^W Gent^H^H^H^H Installed Ubuntu Last Weekend", doesn't mean that you represent the mean computer intelligence of your peers.
Big surprise, son! Not everyone has the patience for tech regardless of its ease of use.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Land of the free... (Score:5, Funny)
Gov't: Hey we are planning a raid on your house next week what time would work for you for us to swing by?
You: I'm kinda busy this week. I have some computers I need to toss out. How bout you swing by next Thursday
Govt: Ok see you then
Re:Land of the free... (Score:4, Insightful)
.... and use assault weapons to arrest someone you have no reason to believe is armed and dangerous.
The police has become a domestic military force.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
No, they use assault rifles because they like to pretend their soldiers at war, but are really cowards.
Re: (Score:3)
Ah, child support: where the woman gets to regard the foetus as her property until parturition, at which point it becomes the man's responsibility.
Yep, the law's about as wrong on that as it is to prohibit the noting down of particular sequences of 0s and 1s. Easier than actually stopping child abuse as all you have to do is subpoena the ISP for the "identity" (oh, wait..) behind a particular IP address and then turn up at the address they supply.
Although IIRC the sequence when talking to cops in the US is
(
Re: (Score:3)
Nobody has suggested the police should have gone in unarmed. They would have had their pistol at their side as they would at any other moment they were on-duty. It's the assault weapons that were a problem here. They are appropriate when raiding gangs or drug houses,
Re:Land of the free... (Score:5, Informative)
Let me tell you a story about excessive force:
A few years ago in Atlanta, the police got a tip from an informant about drug dealers. They sent three undercover officers to serve a no-knock warrant. In other words, they sent three heavily-armed men who weren't dressed as police to kick in somebody's door without any warning. Guess what happened next.
That's right: the old lady who lived alone in the house (and who was not a drug dealer), scared out of her wits, fired a single shot at the armed thugs invading her home. She missed. The "officers" returning fire, on the other hand, used 39 bullets instead of one, and didn't miss five or six times.
Then, of course, they planted drugs on the old lady as she was dying, and it turned out that that the informant had lied (under pressure from police) in the first place.
For more information. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Land of the free... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Recently I looked on my phone trying to get it to connect to my Wifi and noticed that of all the signals it was picking up (about 9) mine was the only one NOT using WEP. Its surprising that people are so incredibly clueless about the technology they use. It's not like it would take that much effort to learn a little about your router before you plug it in.
When I was trying to set up wireless internet between my router and my DS/Wii console, some parts only worked with WEP for one reason or another. This left my choices as either no internet on console (which I use to watch the BBC iPlayer), use WEP, or use unsecured with MAC filtering. Neither are particularly secure, but think what someone who doesn't have a technological background would do when their console complains about wireless security, they'll probably just turn it off entirely to make the problem
Re: (Score:3)
From the police perspective: You've just trained that kid that the police are the last word... we have guns and can tell you what to do.
The kid would grow up scared of police, doing whatever they say without question and perpetuate power. Then when that kid is old enough to start posting on the Internet, they are the first to blame the person being arrested no matter what the guilt level is.