FBI Raids Homes and Seizes Bandwidth Pirates' PCs 815
Saturated Subnet writes "Recently in Toledo, OH FBI agents and a local police task force raided 13 residence and seized 23 computers. Some users of the local cable broadband provider had uncapped their cable modems." It appears to be a smaller ISP, and the
article says these 23 people cost them a quarter of a million bucks. Who
has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
ANd the article says that no arrests were made..... sounds like some enforcing to me.
Pr0n (Score:2, Interesting)
Why seize the computer? (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess the FBI needs to look for scripts or something, because without that, nobody can prove that the end-user did it.
That's not how they do things here in NY.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Everything was fine and dandy until we received email addressed to the account owners basically stating "We know what you are doing. You've broken the terms of service by uncapping your modem. We are going to cap it again. If you abuse our network one more time we will ban your modem's mac address."
Wow! We played the game and lost. We got busted. But... I mean.. shit... I didn't see any mention of legal involvement in letters from our cable provider. They didn't steal our hardware as punishment (which apparently was well withing their means). We learned our lesson and our modems will remain capped.
my
Stealing is bad, MMM-Kay? (Score:3, Interesting)
I almost want to sue the cable company for wasting the time of the FBI. Next time, cut off their service (A pair of wire cutters will do just fine) and take the losers to court and sue them. I couldn't believe the FBI showed up and didn't arrest anyone! Just took the guys computers.
The only real question is did any of their "non-stealing" customers notice that their net connections were slower because of these "bandwidth theives"?
Drumming up charges (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh.. because that wouldn't be news.
The ISP(s?) wanted to make an example (or several examples) of these users.
After *ahem* "backing-up" all the pr0n and w4r3z off these stole^H^H^H^H^Hconfiscated computers, the local police and FBI will use this incident to drum up more support for more arcane laws to restrict the rights of American citizens.
Since 9/11, has *everyone* lost the backbone to fight for personal freedoms and civil liberties?
I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
I think they had a good reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Fucking obtuse people.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Shoplifting *IS* a crime, which will land you in CRIMINAL COURT.
Breaking a TOS is a Breach of Contract, which will land you in CIVIL court.
Point B: (Any reason this wouldn't work?)
If a cable company's user breaks thier terms of service, it's very easy to disconnect thier service and bar them from causing futher loss. Recovering losses is as easy as small claims court.
Of course it won't work for a grocery store as they have few reliable options to prevent people from coming back into thier store to steal.(That's if you're not arresting them)
So, yes it wouldn't work very well with the grocery store, but it would plently fine with the ISP.
I can't believe the FBI is doing this (Score:5, Interesting)
So he contacts the FBI about it. They ask him some questions, like how much money they cost him (basically only a few hours of admin time because he interceeded before any damage took place (the cracked had installed a script to rm -rf / ))
The FBI declines to do ANYTHING about it because it wasn't high-dollar enough to warrent investigation.
We hear all this talk about cyber-crime and the potential threat to our national infastructure, but the FBI won't prosecute unless the case is high-profile enough to get them headlines. I don't think this is the message we ought to be sending, that it's OK to root someone's box and nothing will happen to you if the dammage doesn't exceed a certain dollar amount.
Re:And they needed the FBI for this? (Score:1, Interesting)
I realize there are laws that might spell certain criminal legal action, but this seems like more of a civil suit kind of deal.
Maybe that's what the cable company wants to do. No one was arrested yet, and the equipment that was confiscated is absolutely necessary to a successful civil case.
Wow this hits close to home... (Score:2, Interesting)
Geez, I sure am glad *I* decided not to uncap my modem. Wow.
Oh, and on a completely seperate note I noticed yesterday that I was downloading a file at 125 kb/s. I've never gotten above 110 kb/s before on that ISP...
I guess those few bandwidth hogs really do affect other users.
in other news.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Clueless reporter? or... (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmmm...
What kind of network does Buckeye have? (Score:2, Interesting)
from the article - "Investigators believe cable modems that connect Buckeye Express customers to the Internet
were altered, allowing computer users unauthorized access to excessive amounts of bandwidth"[emphasis mine]
also from the article - "It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective
said. Mr. Shryock said changing the modem to use more bandwidth is a violation
of the customer service agreement. [...again emphasis mine]
(very simplified)Example:
Max bandwidth that Buckeye has = 1Gb/s (with customer cap at 100Mb/s)
4customers online -
1st (with cap) downloading at 100Mb/s
2nd (with cap) downloding at 100Mb/s
3rd (no cap) downloading at 400Mb/s
4th (no cap) downloading at 400Mb/s
---
When customer 5 comes online it's not like his cable modem is going to go
"sorry all the bandwidth is being used, try again later".
And you can correct me if i'm wrong but what should happen is something
about like this:
1st (with cap) adjusted to ~ 95Mb/s
2nd (with cap) adjusted to ~ 95Mb/s
3rd (no cap ) adjusted to ~360Mb/s
4th (no cap) adjusted to ~ 360Mb/s
5th (with cap) downloading at ~ 90Mb/s
the uncapped customers speeds dropping rapidly to matched the capped customers
speeds.
Re:Definition of Theft (Score:1, Interesting)
I find it amusing that people that live on land that they only have because their government killed 11 million people are talking about the morals of theft of bandwidth. Not to mention that it is the same government that has supplied weapons to other countries for invasion of other lands in which many thousand more innocent people were slaughtered.
On a lighter note I wonder if anyone has even thought about the fact that when the cable companies coax you into the contract to begin with they give you an amount of bandwidth that you should be expecting without any intention of delivering the full amount of bandwidth. Many businesses do this sort of thing. I like the road analogy so I'll stick to that. Lets say they are selling you access to a three lane highway and tell you you can drive up to three cars through this one point at a time. Now they know that most people wouldn't be driving three cars down the highway at the same time so they sell those same three lanes to a whole lot of people now as these people increase conjestion happens. Are they refunding the money you paid for the bandwidth that you aren't capable of getting because they didn't build a big enough pipe. No. So why is it always the corporate interest we protect and not that of the private citizen?
Disturbing Tactics (Score:3, Interesting)
In all, they seized 23 computers, including three laptops; three hard drives, and 13 cable modems.
No charges were filed and no arrests were made.
Really? The government was used to sieze property, not owned by the provider, and not one charge was filed.
I don't believe this was a legal action, at most the cable modem was something that that could have been taken, not computers, at least not without charges.
It's so nice to live in Amerika.
WTF... (Score:2, Interesting)
So they let them keep going for 4 months? When the company found out they should have killed the accounts. IANAL but I would argue that any extra cost incurred after the Cable Co. found out are less the responsibility of the users and more so that of the company itself. If someone was stealing from me I wouldn't let them keep doing it for four months so I could nail them for a bigger crime. Isn't that entrapment or something?