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Busted For Using Library Wi-Fi Outside The Library
sevej writes "Keith Shaw, in his weekly column "Wireless Computing Devices" (Network World Fusion), reported on a recent entry in AKMA's Random Thoughts where AKMA was using a public WiFi network outside of a library. A policeman approached him and asked that he only access the Internet from within the Library and hinted that Federal Laws against "signal theft" were applicable. Oh, and btw, we're not talking about a person that looked like your stereotypical 'hacker'; AKMA is an ordained priest."
I wonder how the police officee knew the priest was using wi-fi? A wi-fi sniffer or something like this?
Of what... the church of Emacs?
:-)
Sorry... had to
The signal itself was not stolen, it was the receiver's bandwidth.
Now, had they secured their Airport, they would not had it vampirized.
And I am not sure the inside/outside concept applies to a radio signal...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I would have asked the officer for his FCC badge.
Don't Vote for Norm Dicks! http://www.nodicks2008.com Another nutless dirtbag that voted for the FISA bill!
He should have replied that since it was a public access point that he was in his rights to use it in a public area (namely outside the library)
"A policeman approached him and asked that he only access the Internet from within the Library"
What if the guy wasn't using the Internet but was editing his site and was looking at the preview? (this was not the case but what if)
Have you metaroderated recently?
He didn't. He assumed and even when he knew AKMA wasn't using wifi, he still told him to leave.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
The big thing here is that he wasn't "busted" he was simply "asked" not to. If he were actually busted we'd get a chance for this to come across a judge and have a ruling.
Don't Tread on Me
From the article: I responded, "But this is a radio signal thing -- it's not like a cable connection, it's like someone has a porch light on and I'm sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I'm not stealing their light."
These are nowhere analogous,you are stealing bandwidth when u use WiFi this way,but its not the same with light which anyway is gonna illuminate the bench without an added effort to the wattage.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Oh, and btw, we're not talking about a person that looked like your stereotypical 'hacker'; AKMA is an ordained priest.
What are you advocating here exactly? That police officers are more justified to harrass some because of their look? Or that the law is less applicable to some people because of their job? With ignorant, prejudicial comments like this who needs rights eh? Let's just roundup all those who look like they may cause trouble and be done with it...
Looks, job, race, gender, etc should have nothing to do with the law and law enforcement. Laws and rights apply to everyone equally.
I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.
"Why don't you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?'
Quite apart from the signal stealing part, isn't the fact that the cop asks him to move on a bit worrying? He's demonstrably not breaking the law and is sitting on public land. Are they just going to ban using laptops with wifi cards near any wireless point?
It's a public, wireless network. It's nothing to do with being protected - what's to stop you connecting inside, then walking outside to enjoy the sunshine? The point was that you're only allowed to use the public, wireless network within a defined area - like suggesting you can't listen to an AM radio signal from another country because they haven't paid licencing fees in your area.
Now that's just great, now we're slashdotting a priest....
He's still got glasses and wears all black. Sounds like probable cause to me.
I'm joking, in case you can't tell.
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
Seriously...where was this at? I read his site and didn't see where he's from.
I smell something very fishy here BTW. He showed the cop the second time that he wasn't connecting to anywhere and yet the cop told him to move along. Move along? He was on a bench on public land just looking at his computer! The cop had no right to tell him to move along!
Two sides to every story I suppose, but would be interesting to call the police station and get their take on it...if only I knew where this was all taking place.
Also, where is this story reported from? The submitter of the story said "Keith Shaw, in his weekly column" yet the link just goes to an index where I can't find anything on AKMA...nor does it even show up on a search of the site!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Or watching the Olympic coverage on the internet because NBC paid millions and don't want people to watch it without ads?
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Here is the law .Refer (a)(2)(C)
fifteen jugglers, five believers
I'm really getting tired of these "it's like stealing..." analogies. Between the MPAA and The Airwave NAZIs, I'm beginning to wonder if people REALLY understand technology at all...
The Airwave Nazis will say something similar to the cop in blog posting listed in the article above. Something along the lines of "It's like stealing somebodies cable or walking up and plugging in your hairdryer to the electrical outlet on the outside of their home"
NO, it's NOT.
The priest in the article likened it to reading off their porchlight,which is a pretty good analogy. I prefer to say that it is more along the lines of tossing your empty bottle into someones trashcan they have set to the curb without a lid (it may not be "polite" and *some* people might not appreciate it too much....but you're not "stealing" their trash service by doing so). If someone gets so upset at the idea that someone passing by might throw their empty coke bottle into their beloved garbage can, they can simply put a lid on it (which would discourage most would be bottle-throwers) or, in the analogy, the WiFi AP owner could simply turn on WEP (which would discourage most would be bandwidth users).
Regardless of the analogy, it simply is not "stealing", no matter what some judge decided.
Theft of service, my ass.
Please remember the percentage of bad cops is proportionate to the percentage of bad citizens- perhaps a little higher. With little pay and very little respect from the general public, the only incentive beyond pure altruism I can see for becoming a cop is the power trip.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
You can't steal what's being given away for free.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
The policeman's conduct was perfect, he followed orders. The real point here is a federal law that stops you from using WiFi outside, or the fact that it's interpreted that way.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Since when is it in the job description of the Police Department to help carry out statistical surveys for the local library? If the librarians want more statistics, they can simply log more traffic.
BTW, how do you propose keeping all users indoors may help with their statistics? Is it so the librarians can look them over and make notes like "suspicious-looking priest in black with glasses and TiBook" in their little statistical notebooks?
Encrypting wouldn't help much as they would have to give out the key anyway it being a public access point
Yeees. Go on. Keep thinking, you're on to something here. What if it ceases to be a public access point when you turn encryption on? Since the library already had an encrypted AP too, it seems to me this one was intentionally left public and open. Hell, he even had a library card so if they had encrypted the signal and made the AP available for known users only, he would most likely have had access to the key. It would be interesting to see the incident report.
BTW, he's not alone being questioned by police about his horrible crimes and terrorist activities.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Later the same day the policeman was excommunicated for praying outside his local church.
Obviously there is no law pertaining to laptop use in public,
not yet... just wait.
the more people that sit passively and are privately disgusted at stories like this the more draconian laws we will get.
If YOU dont get publically outraged, inform others and express your concern and outrage to all your government officials then you are the cause of laws like DMCA, PATRIOT, and The Public Laptop Decency Act of 2006.
A local city councilwoman here in my town wanted to make it illegal to criticize the city council or the city it's self. except for a few people that had enough balls to go to meetings and call her "Herr Hitler" and spend their money and time informing the rest of the public that this woman wanted a law that would limit their free speech severly, it would have passed because 90% of the people that live in your town are sheep. Be the 10% that actually care and do something.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Redirect all traffic from unknown users to a local webserver, which contains a usage agreement. After the user clicks "Accept" add their MAC address to the list of known users, and maybe remove it after 24 hours or so.
Then you might have "fallen" up a flight of stairs while "resisting arrest." Don't tip off a cop that you're going to report something--figure out what you can and report it when you're safely aware, so long as it's worth harassment from his colleagues whenever you happen to again cross that jurisdiction, or continually if, heaven forbid, you live in it.
Remember, we now live in a country where failure to produce "your papers" for the police is an arrestable offense, affirmed by our corrupt Supreme Court. It doesn't pay to be excessively vocal about invoking rights that, when it comes down to it, we no longer have for all practical purposes, unless you have a martyr complex. And as we see demonstrated every day here, holding one's breath waiting for the outraged public to agitate for your release would be fatal save for the autonomous nervous system.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
My question is, was this person still on library property? I don't know about this particular library, but many of the ones I visit have an outside area to sit and read the books you just checked out. So, if he was still on the library's property, isn't he still "in the library"?
And another thought (random as it may be) doesn't he, as a taxpaying citizen (yes church folk still have taxes) have a right to use a public access wiFi connection? After all, it's offered as a free service to the public, not just some of the public.
Now if he was doing something malicious (hacking their server, sending spam), perhaps the police have a point, but for general use, I don't see how simply accessing a public connection is a problem.
My brother in law is a civil engineer. His pet peeve is that somebody will get hurt when a porch railing collapse, and the local authorities will amend the building code to require that porch railings be built stronger. Except that the problem was that the railing didn't meet code to begin with. Then carpenters will scratch their heads and ask him whether a railing they just built is strong enough.
His solution is the "butt test". Take the biggest guy you have on site. Stand next to him a couple feet away from the rail, and fall backwards so your butts land on the rail at the same time. If this doesn't make you nervous, then the railing is strong enough.
This situation is pretty much analagous to a lot of cyberlaws. They're supposed to "clarify" things but all they do is create a bunch of new restrictions everyone has to learn to steer their way around. It all gets muddled up in the average person (or cop's head) to the point where they are n't sure what is legal or not. It probably never makes sense to propose a law to "clarify" anything, at least until the courts have had a crack at the situation. Prosecutors are pretty creative at finding ways to do this, and if the courts get it wrong, then it's time for a new law. Programs can be created to educate police and prosecutors on strategies for using existing laws. But that would (a) take longer, (b) appear to be more expensive and (c) doesn't sound as good. It sounds better to say "I wrote a law to stop kiddie porn over the Internet", than "I sponsored a program to teach law enforcement how to use the law against people trafficking in kiddie porn on the Internet." Create an educational program points out the (true) fact that you can't do anything directly about kiddie porn, you're one step removed from the actual action.
I should point out reason (d), though: new laws are a chance to change the way the law works to favor one party or another.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Cellphones work on the assumption that the radio frequencies used are to have the same operative security from snooping as wireline communications. This is one of the reasons that radio scanners have the cellphone frequencies blocked out. Computer networking relies on wireline transport. Wi-Fi transport is relatively new. Even though the signal passes through the walls and outside, if the operational policy of the library (run by the city or county), who runs and maintains the AP, states that you have to be within the physical building to use the services, they are within their right to ask the local gendarme to ask the errant user to quit. Since they would have the ability to control who plugs in a ethernet cable into a public router, the same idea here should apply here to the wireless side. AFAIK, the FCC has not transported the cellular telephone privacy idea to Wi-Fi. It would be interesting to see if some deep-pockets spread some dead-president lubricant on the FCC to enact the philosophy or worse yet, having Wi-Fi ports be licensed with the usual outrageous wallet tapping. If those thieves do that, then I drop my Part 15 operation and switch over to Part 97 operation using VPN.
Ah, but the key thing to remember here is that it was not an agent of the library. It was not even in response to an agent of the library.
A uniformed policeman who had been told by the secret service that "theft of signal" was a new form of crime. Said officer informed this individual that he was committing a crime and needed to move on.
The article doesn't even say if the library thinks their open wi-fi should be accessible to people sitting on that particular park bench.
This is not a case of violating the rules of the access point. This is a case of someone deciding that the entire category of hooking up to a wi-fi point is a crime and informing the person they were in violation. To the point that using a computer in a vicinity of a wi-fi without actually using the wi-fi is cause to be moved along.
Any arguments about the library being able to enforce their own rules are mostly irrelevant since we have no idea what the libraries rules/stance on this actually are. [OK, in some of the follow up posts they posted rules about when they'd have the access point open ].
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
if this was in the USA, actually thanks to HBO in 1981 it is NOT illegal the officer was completely wrong. the law is very clear on this. It is not illegal to take any signal out of the air. it is however illegal to decrypt a signal. That is why HBO ended up having to scramble their signals. They were sueing provate satellite dish owners and manufacturers for copyright infringement. The US supreme court held that if it was not encrypted, it was indeed public domain.
Secondly, the FCC has detemined certain channels to be public use. the 2.4 gig range used by WI/Fi is among those.
New and improved Guilt. Now its alcohol soluble!
So from the article I assertain that:
a) our friend the priest was accessing a PUBLIC WIFI AP
b) it was from a Library offering PUBLIC NET access
c) it is illegal (according to Boss Hog) to access a PUBLIC ACCESS spot (even though the range allows you to) from outside that building.
You know it makes me wonder, how many of these laws are real. The articles author could have hopped into the library to look it up. It would not at all surprise me to see that no law exists concerning Public WIFI AP's.
Ok true people have dl'd kiddie pr0n on other peoples bandwidth but still. The ones doing that aren't going to stop because now it's a Federal Law.
I would have searched for that law. Printed it out and had I found nothing even remotely close. I would have told Boss Hog he was harrasing me and to shuffle his way down to Dunkin Donuts.
I am not one who hates Police and thinks they are all "The Man".
They are there for our protection, and I applaud them for the job they do.Yet I also wonder how many of them, create these imaginary laws and tell people well it's a such and such law you cant do this. People may argue, but like the blog stated "you can explain it to the Cheif if ya like", so he has threatened to arrest this Priest on possibly an imaginary charge. My bet would be that if the Priest did not cease and he went before the Magistrate it would have been something completely different than accessing a public wifi spot outside a library.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
And accessing an open AP is also following protocol. You may wish it wasn't so, but it is.
How can you say that being in close proximity of the library is being a patron?
Because it's protocol. Anyone using the library's services is, by definition, a patron. He had a library card, he sat on their bench, leaned against the library wall and accessed their open public AP (not their closed, encrypted one, mind you). He's a patron. Read their web, they specify how to use the library's resources, request books and search their databases from your home, hundreds or thousands of miles away. Being a patron of a library is demonstrably not a geographic function.
Library staff may limit use of computer equipment which has been purchased from grant funds, according to the terms or intent of the grant agreement.
Users will not make any attempt to gain unauthorized access to restricted files or networks, or to damage or modify computer equipment or software.
The library staff did not limit use of the computer equipment, it was an open AP, hence by definition unlimited. A cop came along and cited a non-existant federal law and rousted him from a public area.
The priest did not make any attempts to gain unauthorized access to any restricted file or network. It was unrestricted. None of these rules apply and I suspect you just added them to look like you read their website. Maybe you did read it, but you obviously didn't understand a word.
How can you even say that has anything to do with it?
It doesn't. And neither did your analogy. "You can not compare apples and bandwidth." I'm quite sure I wrote that in the post you replied to. Mine was just another example of the futility to try and construct analogies between tangibles and intangibles.
I'm sure that the library doesn't have a sign saying: "please connect to the Internet, other people inside aren't doing the same"
BTW, the library was closed so it's not as if he was consuming anyone else's bandwidth - he had the pipe to himself.
At least he should have went inside and asked a librarian
At least you should have read the article. THE LIBRARY WAS CLOSED.
We need to stop the idea that any "hotspot" without a WEP key or WPA is free for anyone to use.
No we don't. We need to make sure all AP operators know to secure them if they don't want them used. Otherwise there will be tons of laws and people will go to jail and their lives will be ruined, because they followed the prevailing protocol - an open AP is a free AP. We can't reverse that protocol more than we can reverse the protocol that says that you can sit on a public bench outside the library or the protocol that says that you shouldn't take apples from outside the grocery story.
But we can educate the owners of access points on the protocol.
Money for nothing, pix for free
Why should he be held to rules that apply only _inside_ the library?
Remember. He was outside the library.
Why should the AUP only apply inside the library? I agree that this whole story is ridiculous, but I'd say the rules for an access point are the rules for an access point. Unless you want your tax dollars paying for libraries to install EM shielding in all their walls, I'd recommend you think about this one for a second.
Just because I leave my door open doesn't mean you can walk into my house whenever you want. Yes, it may be stupid on my part, and yes, it changes it from break and enter to trespass, but it's still not acceptable. Similarily, just because my WiFi connection is open, doesn't mean you're allowed to do whatever you want with it.
I'd imagine he was probably obeying the terms of the AUP regardless, but if he'd never gone in and read it, that's kind of weak on his part. If someone's offering a free service, at least be respectful of their terms, so you don't ruin it for everyone.
I'm recently retired as an IT director for a public library. Two years ago I put WiFi in place at nine branches and INTENTIONALLY placed hubs near windows facing parking lots to allow WiFi access outside the buildings and outside normal open hours. We don't guarantee outide (or inside) 100% coverage. (Dooesn't work? Move to another chair!), but the idea is to provide free public access.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.