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FBI Raids Homes and Seizes Bandwidth Pirates' PCs
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?
What happend to just cancelling their service?
Who's going to use buckeye cable after it is known they have their customers arrested? Who's to say they didn't make the mistake? Someone complains of high ping, tech tampers with modem, and a few months later, the customer goes to jail? There's service with a smile. Thanks, but if I heard that, I'd certainly be looking at my DSL providers.
"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
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.
How about something simpler? I suggest the following:
Dear customer,
We have detected that you have uncapped your cable modem, and are using more bandwidth than specified in your contract. You have 3 days to revert the changes you made to your cable modem, or your service will pernamently be canceled and you will be billed for the excess bandwidth you have used at a rate of $XX.XX per megabyte.
Any reason why this wouldn't work? Sending the FBI to investigate is a waste of time and resources for our govt IMHO.
Keep in mind that the quarter million dollar figure may have nothing to do with the actual actual damages incurred. Companies often make up figures like this in order to get the FBI's attention, since nothing under $5000 worth of damage is worth investigating. It also makes for better headlines, especially with a politically ambitious prosecutor.
Sure, this would be lying to Federal agents, which is a felony; but several companies got away with it in the Mitnick case, too.
Finding God in a Dog
Who has time to look at $10,800 worth of pr0n?
Taco, some things in life you make time for.
Some people may be wondering why the FBI was involved with this. The answer is simple. This constitutes fraud.
If you were to wire up a box on your phone to enable you to get free calls then you'd find your self in the same situation. And its escentialy the same crime as uncaping your cable modem/dsl router. As stealing phone calls detriments the ability of the whole network from ordinary users, so does stealing bandwidth.
I find myself stressing this again, Bandwidth Is Not Free. Bandwidth is not an artificialy restricted resource. It is a true limited resource, there is only so much you can put over a cable, and you need to ofset the costs of maintenece on that cable and the initial cost of laying it in the first place.
Doing it is illegal. Its also easy to trace. So they called the people who have jurisdiction for wire frauds and computer crime. its as simple as that. ISPs regularly warn users not to do this, and when they do, its justifyable to take it up with the authorities.
Wether its rational to do search and seazure of equipment is another matter, that may put the FBI in the wrong.
You're anology has this huge gaping hole in it...
1. Speeding is a crime...
2. Breaking TOS is a breach of contract
One of these subjects you statuatory court, the other subjects you to civil court.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
...it is breach of contract, nothing more. And, since it is a breach of contract, as numerous others have pointed out, a pair of wire cutters (or a flip of a switch) would have more than sufficed to put an end to this behavior.
... you are merely in debt for the difference still owed. No theft committed. None.
If you agree to drive 10 truck on the expressway for a certain, flat tax, and instead drive 500, you haven't stolen anything. Not even the taxes you should have paid. The road is still there, the taxes you did pay are still there
You've violated your contract (and failed to pay taxes that are due), but once again, that is not theft. The same is true in this situation.
Your other point is very good: wonders how many Al Q'aida sleeper cells are going to go undetected here in the U.S. because of American companies like this one who feel it somehow appropriate to appropriate the FBI's services as an enforcement arm of their End User License Agreements and service contracts.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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..
It took some digging but I found the link to their TOS (PDF) click here
Ideally the government wouldn't have been involved at all, but instead have the parties settle it among themselves. However, I guess after having to deal with so many people trying this more drastic, newsworthy measures need be taken to let users know they mean business and not to try this for kicks. If the only punishment is a cancellation of service, a lot of people will try and get permanently banned, a fate which results ultimately in the ISP not getting money from that user who might have behaved himself if he thought he had more to lose than his account.
All this said, I'm not sure why this is FBI jurisdiction rather than local law enforcement agency. I suppose the main body of the ISP is proabably not in the same state, but you would think they would operate through their local presence. Of course, the FBI is more newsworthy than local police.
At this stage they say they have not charged anyone with anything, but confiscated systems for evidence. My bet is that the systems will be returned and charges never filed. This is more of a scare tactic. Really scare the perpetrators, and spread more awareness of the seriousness of the issue among the people. In the end they will let them off, making the company look better while acheiving the wider scare they wanted. They really have nothing to gain by punishing those individuals except bad publicity.
This whole scenario just goes to demonstrate that cable providers as a whole went into the ISP business unprepared with a lack of understanding of the problems an ISP faces. Routers should cap this stuff, not endstations, and their network infrastructure has proved in many cases to crumble under the stress, kind of like what happened when AOL first offered unlimited time plans. Now cable companies are more and more going to charge for extra bandwidth because they have been unable to figure out how to regulate network usage from a technical perspective without losing their peak rates. The Telco companies with DSL were not able to match the peak rate of cable modem, but now with the improvement of DSL technology and the saturation of both types of networks, DSL has proven to frequently provide more consistant, reliable service, even if peak DSL throughput is not equal to cable, the realistic throughput is on average better than Cable.
Now to see if cable companies can mature as ISPs, or if DSL will come to dominate in the coming years.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Where I do have a problem is with what actually happened and the lack of due process associated. Look at the sequence of events:
- The ISP notices the uncapped modem (I gather they use SNMP to ask the modem what its set to: nothing sophisticated).
- The ISP calls the FBI and alleges that this crime has cost it over $10,000. Hmmm. Where did that number come from? I'm on a 512kbit service for £25/month. Suppose I uncapped my modem to get the theoretical maximum of 64Mbits (the full channel bandwidth that is shared between all users on a spur). That is in theory a 128-fold increase in service, so I should be paying £3,200 per month, or around $5,000. So that may be two months service at 64Mbits. Maybe not too unreasonable, although I don't know how they estimated the time.
- The FBI get a search warrant based on the ISP's complaint and seize computers. This is perfectly legal: the authorities are permitted to seize the "instrumentality of the crime". If a PC was used to uncap the modem then it is an instrumentality of the crime. Also, if the case came to court then the defence could ask what evidence the prosecution had that the supposed perpetrators were actually responsible. Maybe it was a prankster thinking to do a "favour". Any prosecution is going to need smoking-gun scripts found on the suspect's PCs.
-
No charges are filed. Despite what I said just now, the whole thing is never tested in court. Confiscation of the computers (and any private data thereon) is considered enough of a punishment, and doesn't require the expense of a trial.
All of this is perfectly reasonable and legal, but it is never the less an end-run around the due-process principle. Based on a complaint and a search warrant your property can be effectively confiscated, and you have almost no come-back. Of course in theory you can sue for the return of your property, but all the police have to do is claim an "ongoing investigation" to make the suit fail.Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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
Now for those of you who plan to point it out, excessive speeding is usually charged as reckless endangerment which is a crime, and hence will go on your criminal record, and will likely get you jail time.
Maybe I am just one of those old moralists or it was my Catholic school up bringing. I think when you take something that is not yours, its stealing.
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
So if you if you signed a contract that states you will only take 1.5Mb/s of bandwidth and you modify a device to take more than 1.5Mb/s, you are stealing along with breaching a contract.
No, you're not, anymore than you are "stealing" if you rent a car agreeing to not drive it faster than 65 MPH, then take it out on the highway and top it out at 120 MPH.
You are misusing equipment and violating your contract. You haven't taken anything, ergo you have stolen nothing.
It is abuses of the English language like this that not only muddy thinking, but result in the kinds of preposterous public policy such muddy thinking creates, such as the Microsoft/Hollywood attempt at using DRM to cripple technology and consumer choice in the name of preventing "theft" which doesn't even exist (c.f the Palladium thread and the numerous DMCA, SSSCA. CBDTPA, and TCPA threads).
Redefining words to mean something they don't, and then misusing those definitions, is not the moral high ground.
If you want to argue that abusing equipment and violating service agreements is morally wrong, I would agree with you. However, if you want to continue to argue that abusing a service now suddenly equates theft, even when nothing has been taken, then I must respectfully disagree.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Sorry I wasn't able to post sooner regarding this story, but I got home from school, and all my computer shit was confiscated! I had to go next door just to check my e-mail!
This blows, and shit -- is my friends cable internet connection really this slow?
dmarien
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.
D04Nu75 00\/\/z y()()!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Yes, but nothing here has been taken.
You are so wrong it's obscene. When you signup with an ISP, what do you get? You get an internet connection, and X amount of bandwidth. You have BOUGHT that bandwidth, it's yours... If you take more than that it's stealing.
Your thinking is so muddy it's obscene. The Mississippi River is pristine in comparison.
Let me use another real world analogy that should clear this up:
If you are a shipping company using the limited capacity of, say, the Panama or Suez canal, and you have a contract that allows you to send 5 ships a day through the canal for a particular price, and you decide to slip 10 ships through instead, have you stolen the canal?
No.
Have you stolen money from the canal operators (assume for a moment there is no way for them to easilly charge you each time a ship passes through, ie. no toll booth on the canal itself)?
No.
Do you owe the canal operators money?
Yes.
Are you in violation of your contract?
Yes.
Are you absuing the services of the canal by taking up more of its capacity than your contract allows?
Yes.
Are you "stealing" capacity?
No, because capacity is a numerical measure, not an object that can be stolen. You are misusing the canal's limited resources, but you are not taking them anywhere.
To make this even more crystal clear for those who are still unable to shed the mental shackles of the Newspeak definitino of theft that the media cartels have been feeding them for the last two decades, consider this.
If, instead of filling the canal with ships and using up its capacity in that fashion, are you engaging in theft if you blow the canal up and turn it into a dry river bed?
No, obviously not. You haven't engaged in theft at all, you've engaged in vandalism, sabatage, and perhaps terrorism, but you have not engaged in theft, even though you've reduced the canal's usable capacity down to zero.
How about if you build a damn to block the canal (but don't destroy it)?
Again, no, you aren't stealing anything, you are merely abusing the canal and making it useless to others, ie. are reducing its usable capacity to zero.
Using something in excess to what your contract allows, such as capacity, is not and can never be theft. Indeed the very nature of what we are talking about precludes the possibility of theft as such, without rewriting the definition of the word itself to mean something different than it does, which is exactly what you, and the software and entertainment monopolists you so transparently represent, are trying to do. Which is muddy thinking at its worst.
Allow me to reiterate for the remarkably dense: You haven't stolen anything, you haven't taken anything. Capacity is not an object that can be taken, no theft can be committed.
Your inability to think clearly is a direct result of your misuse of the English language, probably because of your inability to question the misuse of the same language software and entertainment monopolists have been feeding you for years.
BANDWIDTH isn't a thing, it is a measure of capacity, and just as your overuse of a canal's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind, so to your overuse of a network's capacity doesn't entail theft of any kind.
It does, however, mean you are in violation of contract and very likely owe a serious debt to the providor whose equipment and network you have misused.
It is plain and simple misuse of the English language and common sense that truly results in muddy thinking, exactly like the kind you are displaying here.
Yes, bandwidth is limited. But it nevertheless cannot be taken, and cannot be stolen (without rewriting the defintion of those words), it can merely be misused or abused.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
If each contributed equally, that's $19230 each in bandwidth. $19k buys a lot of bandwitdh... much more than a single home could potentially use, even over many months. For example, this budgetary pricing for Verio (a backbone provider) shows that the monthly charge for a 155 Mbit/sec OC-3 line is somewhere around $44k per month.
For that 13 users to have consumed $250k of bandwidth over a period of one year, the "bandwidth cost" would have been equivilant to using one half of a 155 Mbps/sec OC-3 line. Even if all 13 contributed equally, I doubt each of them sustained a 5.7 Mbit/sec stream of data for a whole year! Cable service can rarely run at this speed, and many small groups of houses (like mine) are connected by a 1.2 Mbit/sec line (I saw the At&T tech when he was installing our neighborhood's hub a few months ago). If you consider the "theft" to have occured from February (when "cable officials" claim they first became aware of the situation) until today, that's just 5 months for a "loss" of $50,000 dollars worth of bandwidth each month... equivilant to just 13 users consuming the entire bandwitdh of an OC-3! Even to a someone who has no idea what kind of bandwitdh $250,000 dollars buys, it simply defies imagination that 13 home users would normally consume $50 to $100 per month, could somehow "steal" 1/4 million dollars. It's as rediculous as a claiming someone robbed a 7-11 store and stole 1/4 million dollars from the cash register.
I wonder if it ever occured to Christina Hall or Mark Reiter to ask Paul Shryock how Buckeye figured these 13 home users "stole" such a massive amount. Even if it's larger group of users, it's still an absurd claim. Saddly, they were probably fed a press release with lots of "sound bites", and they threw this scare-tactic story together without even the slighest questioning and investigatave journalism into such an absurd claim.
One thing is for certain... Buckeye CableSystem certainly didn't take a loss of $250,000. If they really were losing that much money, they certainly would have contacted the "others [that] were using a lot". No ISP these days (except perhaps AOL) can afford to take a $250,000 loss and just sit back for five months and wait for the cops to investigage and bust a dozen users.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
So-called metered bandwidth, e.g. fractional T1s or T3s, are still the responsibility of your upstream provider to limit your bandwidth. The only exception I've seen to this is when you are buying a fractional T1 with "free" 100GB transfer -if you take a deal like this, you've made the bed now sleep in it.
Bandwidth limiting is built into many routers and switches, and it's now part of BSD distributions (altqd). There is NO excuse for a cable ISP to not limit their own upstream bandwidth usage at the router, and limiting -or cutting off- customer bandwidth is also likewise trivial.
Finally, if they became aware of uncapped modems back in Feb, why didn't they just cut them off? Simplest thing!
I think the reason they didn't is, they wanted to scare the rest of their customers into behaving.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
Anyone else find it amusing that also in this latest issue of 2600 they have an article on how to uncap your cable modem bandwidth ?? ;-)
Let's see, steal billions, defraud 401K pension plans, no problem. Steal otherwise-unused bandwith, get arrested.
Yep, One Nation, Under God has sure served as a good moral compass these last 48 years.
Infuriate left and right
Of course Ken Lay hasn't been charged with anything.
None of the Toledo bandwidth thieves are socialites with a history of making donations to political parties. Nor can they afford fantastic legal advice. If they could, they wouldn't need to steal bandwidth.
President Bush said something about how "95 percent of American business is run honestly and fairly, without incident." Too bad that other 5 percent is stealing MILLIONS OF DOLLARS from people who never had it to begin with.