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Jailtime For Leeching Wireless?
jginspace writes "A 17-year-old from Singapore is is facing three years' jailtime for accessing his neighbor's wireless network.
His neighbor complained and now the unfortunate Tan Jia Luo is facing charges under the computer misuse act and is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday."
The problem is that while some people are clueless and don't secure their wireless, other people have a sharing nature and leave theirs open on purpose. How the heck do you tell the difference?
You know what? Fuck you.
I will be continuing to run my intentionally "unsecured" wireless network.
How come every random carrier gets to run a wireless network that anybody can use for $10/hour (and, yes, that can be paid anonymously in cash), but I should be punished if I choose to do the same thing for free? For that matter, how come the backbone ISPs get to carry traffic for everybody, everywhere, without asking any questions, but I shouldn't? How come (I suspect you think) they're not responsible for what their users do, but I am?
If you don't like freedom of communication, then get off the Internet.
Oh, and the kid was in the wrong only if he was somehow on notice that the network wasn't intended to be public. Otherwise my right to run an open network would be compromised.
I'm sorry; I missed the second part.
In fact, I am just the "keeper of the pipe" in the same way that my upstream ISP is. I AM a service provider for my wireless users, and all the protections applied to service providers apply to me. I have as much legal right, and certainly as much moral right, to act as a service provider as does any large, for-profit corporate entity.
The basic moral truth here is that I have an absolute right to provide any communication service I want to anybody. Where I am, the law doesn't forbid that right now. Changing or reinterpreting the law to forbid it, or to make it impractical by loading on a lot of stupid administrative and data retention requirements, would be evil and illegitimate.