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War Driving To Be Protected In NH
AllMightyPaul writes "A big article on Wired.com talks about the new House Bill 495 that would legalize the innocent stumbling upon open wireless networks. Basically, it put the burden of securing a wireless network on the owner of the network and allows people to connect to open networks that they believe are supposed to be open. This is excellent news as I'm sure we've all tried to connect to one wireless network and ended up accidentally connecting to another one. Being from NH, now I can finally drive through Manchester and connect anywhere I want with little worry, but not until after January 2004, and that's if the bill passes the Senate."
And how many of those people (if any) were malicious hackers?
Why don't our legislators spend their time protecting innocent people (Skylarov, Felten, Serebryany, etc.) from laws like the DMCA that have been abused, instead of saying "hey, it's legal to wardrive, which nobody has ever been maliciously prosecuted for"?
I don't recall the wording, but doesn't most of this equipment carry a message from the FCC that says that the device must accept any interference from other devices?
Maybe it's a bit backward, but I think that can justify your having picked up the signal; you were just accepting interference...
Okay, I'll bite.
If you're talking about this law protecting the innocent person who accidentally connects to a different network than they intended, I'd agree.
If you're talking about somebody who is intentionally wardriving looking for networks that he/she can get into and explore for juicy stuff, then I'll disagree.
Certainly, the admins of such networks have acted irresponsibly (assuming it wasn't some incredible new hack that broke into a secured network); but that doesn't mean the wardriver has no culpability in this situation.
This is one of those areas where the law can't cover everything. It's wrong to walk into an open house and take things when you know the owners didn't want you in there. Whether or not the door was open, and whether or not there was a welcome mat on the porch, you damned well know you shouldn't walk into a stranger's house and take their things.
And when you did, it wouldn't be the owner's fault that you're a worthless amoral turd. It would still be yours; whether or not they were stupid.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Some background, for those who need it. The first amendment (to take a well-known example) doesn't say "You get the freedom of speech." It says "Congress shall make no law abidging the freedom of speech." In other words, the freedom in question is assumed to pre-exist the Constitution, and the Constitution is just explicitly recognizing it, and declaring it as a limit on governmental power.
But there's a contradiction built in, because the Bill of Rights still enumerates particular rights, and for a couple of centuries courts have been understandably less willing to protect rights that aren't explicitly enumerated (privacy and substantive due process and the backlash against it being the exception that proves the rule) than those that are.
Yes, enumerating freedoms can have the effect of implying that we are not free to do anything except what is enumerated. But that's a built-in side effect of the way the Bill of Rights is written. It's even worse since the courts rules that the 14th Amendment "incorporates" much of the Bill of Rights applies to the states. Before the 14th Amendment, it wasn't clear that expressions like "Congress shall make no law" applied to state and local legislative bodies. The Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to rule that many of the *enumerated* rights in the Bill of Rights now could be enforced as restrictions on state and local legislatures as well. But this explicitly applies only to things enumerated, and even then only the ones the courts have picked and chosen.
In other words, when you (the previous poster) say "I don't want to start to have my freedoms enumerated by a Congress, Court, or Executive.", I'm saying it is already way, way, way too late. Maybe if that attitude was in place in the 1780's we could have a system that works that way. Of course, with that attitude, we'd still have the Articles of Confederation (which might not be such a bad thing from a small-weak-government-is-good point of view). But we don't.
Additionally (and then I'll shut up), legislative acts creating or recognizing rights are often absolutely essential to turn the abstract principles listed in the Constitution into specific and applicable rules and regulations with enforcement mechanisms. Parts of the post-Civil War amendments were widely disregarded until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act almost 100 years later. Now there were clear rules explaining what did and didn't constitute disenfranchising somebody, and a way to enforce it. If you were a black citizen in Mississippi, it was the Voting Rights Act and not the 15th Amendment that actually made it possible for you to relatively safely get to the voting booth, cast a ballot, and be confident that it was counted.
OK, I've gone off topic, but I'll bring it home. Explicitly listing this freedom is a Good Thing. The freedom to use open wireless networks could be seen as competing with the freedom to use your own wireless network without sharing resources with intruders. We need explicit guidance on how to balance these things, and how to enforce the balance we come up with. That's what legislatures are supposed to do with the system we've got, as opposed to the one we might wish we had. That's what they are doing here.