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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."
Guilty until proven innocent.
So maybe... just maybe, this is a clue that it's not quite right to break down people's doors because of an ip address?
If someone is sitting outside my house, where there is no mobile phone service, and they really desperately need to make a quick Skype call or check their e-mail, it is a neighbourly thing to do to let them use my wifi, just as if their car broke down, it would be a nice thing to offer them a glass of water and a quick phone call to their car breakdown company.
Child pornography trading was not a strict liability offence last time I checked. You have to show some intent, damnit. And until that happens, I'm going to say fuck you to fear and be a good neighbour.
So rather than two Federal Marshalls in ties having a discussion with the gentleman, the Feds come in Police State style, tossing American citizens around like ragdolls and trampling the Constitution and the natural rights of man.
What is wrong with this country?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
"Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale."
The summary is a perfectly accurate representation of how the police/statist spokespeople are spinning this, and of course the mass media just regurgitates it verbatim. But that is totally the wrong point to take from this. It's a cautionary tale, all right -- of the horrifying real-life consequences of our brain-addled priorities towards pornography. And the result is they'll want to make it illegal to share our Internet and information access with fellow citizens. Pretty outrageous.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
...to set up a password?
If you run a business that offers WLAN Internet service to its guests, how do you reliably communicate the password to legitimate guests without also communicating it to those who deal in child pornography and unlicensed controlled substances?
... but it's the police who need to learn.
Maybe we don't need to send SWAT teams in to arrest people unless there is specific evidence that the person being arrested is armed and violent?
Maybe what passes for "probable cause" is a joke these days?
Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale
Indeed, this should be a cautionary tale: obtain better evidence before you make an arrest. Surely there is some kind of penalty in our well-designed system for such sloppiness on the part of law-enforcement. Surely our freedoms have built-in protections. Surely we do not need to respond to attempts by law-enforcement to try to scare us into using encryption if we don't want to ...right?
Just because it's easy for you, Mr. "I Compiled^W Gent^H^H^H^H Installed Ubuntu Last Weekend", doesn't mean that you represent the mean computer intelligence of your peers.
Big surprise, son! Not everyone has the patience for tech regardless of its ease of use.
My advice would be "No one password protect your router"
Then all your concerns about the federal government snooping in on your internet traffic become moot.
Having everyone password protect their router gives the state more power over you.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I'm more bothered about the fact that a screenshot and an IP address is enough to warrant (no pun intended) an armed unit (from Immigration and Customs, for some reason) smashing the door down and throwing the guy down the stairs. When the evidence is that slim, I'd suggest maybe turning up in the daytime and knocking on the door with a warrant to search/confiscate the computers would be a more measured response.
Remember when SWAT teams were only used on violent offenders in situations that were expected to get excessively violent?
Unfortunately, I don't, I was only born in the 80s. I know SWAT teams as being used for everyday arrests and serving warrants, most often by busting down doors of family homes in the dark and shooting people's pets (like the DC area mayor who's dog was shot in the back as it ran away from police during a raid for a crime police had strong evidence he didn't commit but set him up for anyway). No police force needs APCs. Nor should the first line of investigation involve Afghanistan-style street warfare. And where's the police force policing these out of control police forces?
Wake up and realize the cops have militarized against normal citizens.
Celebrities and politicians, under the same charges, are given the opportunity to peacefully turn themselves in.
Normal civilian? Full on SWAT raid
Fuck cops, fuck their families, fuck their friends.. The position these days is only held by the most reprehensible human beings we have to offer.
.... and use assault weapons to arrest someone you have no reason to believe is armed and dangerous.
The police has become a domestic military force.
The Feds could readily determine that the router was unsecured. That means that anybody within a certain radius of the computer could have downloaded the picture.
Probable cause means facts and circumstances that would cause a person of reasonable prudence to believe that the computer in the house that was searched was used to download criminal material or used to store criminal material.
The router is evidence of a crime. It is the device used to get the criminal material. The feds had a legit reason for the search and seizure of the router.
The problem that I have is that the ICE agents behaved like pigs--complete pigs--with respect to the man whose home they invaded. They had facts sufficient to know that they had no probable cause to believe that the man they threw on the ground had done anything wrong. They were under no threat, yet they assaulted him for no good reason.
MAC addresses are easy to spoof.
Mike O'Donnell http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~odonnell/
I have lived in my neighborhood for several years. Within my home detection range, I have access to nearly a dozen wireless hotspots. A few are open. A few use WEP. Two use WPA. A few use WPA2. In the course of my experimenting with wireless security and man in the middle attacks, I have gained access to all of them. The hardest one to crack forced me to set up a dedicated laptop for a week. Now, I'm just a computer guy with an interest in security. I tried just to see what could be done and to gain a better understanding. But the tools I used and the knowledge I have are available to virtually anyone. I'm far from some 'super-hacker'. My point is that if I were a pornographer, none of these would be secure enough to stop me. And yet the police are trying to spin this that somehow the homeowner who was wrongfully arrested was at fault for some security lack on his part. Ridiculous. It's obvious that the police didn't have enough information to justify the raid, and they are just covering that up. Can you imagine the police doing a major raid on your house, doing property damage, seizing your assets, etc. then being told "Hey, you have the same initials as the guy we're really after. We really didn't know enough to figure out if it was you or not, but we figured what the heck, we'd raid you anyway."
And yet these pussies won't go after the REAL threats. Trying going after MS 13 you cowards!
Life is not for the lazy.
Anyone with any sense agrees that a raid with a warning wouldn't be useful. The point is that there should not have been a raid in the first place. Send a couple officers out with a warrant and have them bring the guy in. Life is not an action movie, and wearing a badge does not change that.
The whole point of child porn laws is to prevent children from being sexually exploited. I'm 100% behind that. But all those pictures and videos that the police take down were taken a long time ago. You don't protect any children by keeping that stuff off the internet. If anything, by taking down the old stuff, you encourage perverts to make new stuff - to hurt more children.
A more enlightened country would release all the child porn they have ever seized to registered perverts. So if you're willing to register as a pedophile, you can get access to the government's entire stash (maybe not all at once, but gradually). Registration would require a fee and mandatory counseling, and all materials would be watermarked specifically for you so that you wouldn't share them. But if you abided by all this, could do your pedophilia legally. I have a feeling that this would satiate the porn needs of most pedophiles.
The police could then focus on the real source of harm: The people who take sexual advantage of children. The whole point of the scheme would be to destroy the demand for more child victims. If law enforcement worked with the pedophiles a little, I'm sure that the people who are victimizing children now would also be easier to catch. There might be special rewards for snitches whose tips lead to arrest.
I think that with the sheer grossness of the crime of pedophilia, we lose track of what would be the most effective way of dealing with it. Kicking down doors and throwing innocent people down their own stairways is not it.