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FBI Raids Homes and Seizes Bandwidth Pirates' PCs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-thats-not-very-fun dept.

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?

6 of 679 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by HowlinMad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "It's against the law. It's a crime we are going to enforce," the detective said.

    ANd the article says that no arrests were made..... sounds like some enforcing to me.

    --
    Great Linux Site
  2. Stealing is bad, MMM-Kay? by toupsie · · Score: 3, Interesting
    While I don't think you should not go around modifying equipment that is under a user agreement signed by the user and the equipment provider in order to steal services but sending in the FBI is a bit much. I thought there was more important things to deal with besides obese men with a pr0n addiction using a modified cable modem. You know...that whole "War on Terra" thingy.

    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"?

    --
    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
  3. I think they had a good reason by RealisticWeb.com · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Call me crazy, but I have to beleive that there was somthing going on here that we don't know about. I'm not talking about anything sinister on the FBI's part, I just think that they had a more important reason to investigate that they arn't saying to the public, and this violation was a good excuse to infiltrate. Imagine if the Feds suspected one of those 23 people of a more serious crime like writing viruses, child porn, financial idenity fraud, etc. They have been watching them for some time, and still don't have enough evidence to get a warrent to search the house, but they say to themselfs "if we could take a peek at thier computer". They decide to check with the ISP and see who in the neiborhood was violating the law, and one thing leads to the other. Suddenly they have access to the computer they were looking for, and they didn't alert anyone else involved in the REAL crime that they were aware of what was going on. This sounds much more plausable to me.

    --
    Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
  4. Fucking obtuse people.... by JohnDenver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Point A:

    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.

    --
    "Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
  5. I can't believe the FBI is doing this by Larry_Dillon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I have a friend that hosts a few web sites that had a box rooted (wu-ftp exploit). Ammazingly, he happened to be in the system and noticed. He tracerouted the cracker to his static DSL IP -- basically cought the guy red-handed.


    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.

    --
    Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
  6. Disturbing Tactics by oldstrat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    From the article: (Bold added by me)
    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.