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Bizarre Porn Raid Underscores Wi-Fi Privacy Risks
alphadogg writes "Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of 'pedophile!' and 'pornographer!' stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn't need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents. That new wireless router. He'd gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought. Sure enough, that was the case. Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router."
"Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement."
Almost exactly the opposite. Thee days, there's quite a bit of aggravation aimed at (a) partial immunity for law enforcement, and (b) complete immunity for prosecutors. (Of which the latter often blankets and protects the former.)
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why the intimidation?
For the same reason that the SS would shout "Jew" when they were arrested German Jews during the 1930s and 40s. The police are not just convinced that this guy is guilty; they are convinced that he is guilty of being a sick pedophile, which of course is worse than being a murderer. What was the point of bringing in a paramilitary force to arrest him, when he is suspected of a nonviolent crime, if not to send a message about how we should view people who like child pornography?
Palm trees and 8
You don't even see his point!
If my wireless is open to everyone, and someone used my wireless to commit any non-sanctioned action, I can easily say: It hasn't to be me, someone else might have used it.
If my wireless is closed, and someone breaks my WEP key to use my wireless to commit any non-sanctioned action, it's much more difficult for me to prove myself innocent, because I'm the only one who could have known the right WEP phrase to use it.
So as long as I have a flat rate and don't need to care about the amount of traffic, it's better for me to not lock my wireless.
Downloading child pornography doesn't seem to be a violent crime to me. Why did they need to send a SWAT style raid rather than knocking on the door with a warrant? Did the guy have a history of violent crime?
Aggresive raids get people killed - both the people being raided (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012602136.html) and the police doing the raid (e.g. http://amarillo.com/stories/112201/tex_firedfor.shtml - note that was a raid of someone who owned a lot of guns, but the police did manage to fire 369 shots killing one of their own while the guy being raided did not touch a gun let alone fire a single shot).
For suspects of non-violent crimes (and downloading/viewing child pornography is not more violent than downloading/viewing videos of an assault - that the production of the pornography involves violence is irrelevant) and even for convicted non-violent criminals "kicck the door down and point guns at everyone" raids are only going to increase the risk of death and injury.
Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful essay explaining why he does not protect his wireless node. There are pointers to other essays agreeing and disagreeing with him. I personally agree with Schneier. I consider myself the steward of my Internet connection, more than owner.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
What is wrong with that description exactly? It says IP == "unique identification number, of the router", which is quite precise, particularly for a layman's description, and not at all inaccurate. There's plenty to criticise in OTT policing in raids of houses (WTF do they need assault rifles to arrest a suspect paedophile; why do they fail to consider the chance the person who did the downloading may not be in the house?( - but you've gone awry in picking on that quote.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Well, there was that time I changed ISPs. Couldn't be home for the changeover but the nontechnical roomie was. I left him with two instructions:
1) They DO NOT TOUCH my stuff. Not even to hook it to the ISP's router.
2) If they can't give me a router without wireless, they disable the wireless. Neither of us uses it.
The installation guy wanted to install their "home security suite" (a rebadged McAfee or something) on my PC. He got rebuffed, so instruction #1 went off without a hitch.
The roomie specifically requested the wireless be disabled. The ISP guy said he disabled it. When I got home, turned on my laptop's wireless and checked. And found a wide-open access point that wasn't there that morning. Its name? MY PHONE NUMBER.
And the router was passworded. I couldn't turn it off short of yanking it out. I had to go online (via my laptop because like hell I was plugging my LAN into an open access point), find a list of default passwords the ISP uses, and try them until I hit the right one. I changed the network name to gibberish and then disabled it.
I was later informed that they'd have been more than happy to tell me the password if I just phoned them. The next morning, when the phone lines were open, because I got home too late.
Oh, and wait an hour on hold.
And hope the call center monkey I got didn't think he wasn't allowed to give that info. And knew where to find it.
Sure, it's EASY to change a wireless setting!
An assault rifle is a rifle capable of selective operation in either an automatic or semi-automatic firing mode and using a lighter cartridge -- the AK47 or the M16 being the familiar examples; standard issue for infantry forces and for stormtrooper cops. Not to be confused with "assault weapon", a political/legal term meaning "extra-scary gun".
Not anymore. Blitzkrieg raids have become SOP for anything more severe than unpaid parking tickets, and will probably remain that way until more citizens start greeting these home invasions with kinetic resistance.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Blame the SWAT-ification of the police. Tons of federal money for SWAT but nowhere near enough actual criminals that require that sort of response. So you've got a bunch of expensive people sitting around doing nothing; in order to justify their continued existence management deploys them on ever more trivial work just to be able to say they are being used and deserve to be funded next year.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
What is wrong with that description exactly? It says IP == "unique identification number, of the router", which is quite precise, particularly for a layman's description, and not at all inaccurate.
For something to be a "unique identification number, of the router" that identification number would have to be applied only to that particular router and remain consistent. Think about that for a minute. Is there ever a scenario where your home router ends up with more than one IP address? Can you assign it an arbitrary address? Can it automatically be assigned a new address via DHCP? Will it get a different IP address if you move it to another location / plug it in to a different network?
48 in 2009? I wouldn't complain. It's in the same ballpark as mining deaths in the same year (34). I think that in most police manuals there's a section about use of force, and sending a SWAT-like group after a guy who is not known to be dangerous is preposterous.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Non violent?
Ask the kids who have been raped to produce the stuff.
Sorry to break your mental fantasy of kids being raped against their will... you were probably enjoying it.
Here is where most of the "child pornography" is coming from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexting
Teens taking pictures/videos of themselves and sending it to boy/girl friends online where is gets intercepted.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Teens-and-Sexting.aspx
"A new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found that 4% of cell-owning teens ages 12-17 say they have sent sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images or videos of themselves to someone else via text messaging, a practice also known as “sexting”; 15% say they have received such images of someone they know via text message."
Let me tell you a story about excessive force:
A few years ago in Atlanta, the police got a tip from an informant about drug dealers. They sent three undercover officers to serve a no-knock warrant. In other words, they sent three heavily-armed men who weren't dressed as police to kick in somebody's door without any warning. Guess what happened next.
That's right: the old lady who lived alone in the house (and who was not a drug dealer), scared out of her wits, fired a single shot at the armed thugs invading her home. She missed. The "officers" returning fire, on the other hand, used 39 bullets instead of one, and didn't miss five or six times.
Then, of course, they planted drugs on the old lady as she was dying, and it turned out that that the informant had lied (under pressure from police) in the first place.
For more information.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Clearly, there are situations where going in hot is warranted. However the idea someone apparently dumb enough to download CP from his own living room will be some sort of uber-trigger-happy criminal is just stupid. Someone doing that, thinks they aren't going to be detected and won't be ready for them in which case a polite knock, followed by arrest and seizure of the computer equipment will work just fine.
The police should be doing an investigation first before an arrest, i.e. find out who lives there, get a criminal profile together. Is this some idiot beating off under his desk for 18 hours a day, or an armed crime lord with a meth lab and booby traps? I mean if he's a child pornographer engaged in human trafficking, it would make sense if he was engaged in drug trafficking too; it's not a necessary or common link, but it's sensible. We know meth labs produce lots of explosives, and meth makers like to set up trigger traps for police raids--the police are actually afraid to raid them.
So why don't you make sure you know what you're getting into first? See if the guy is a cunning, paranoid maniac that likely has an impenetrable fortress of death to protect himself; or an idiot that has no clue what he's doing. Act accordingly.
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