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."

Comments

Re:guilty eh?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Land of the free...

[mrchaotica]

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.

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