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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."
The raid could have tipped off the actual perp so he could destroy evidence.
I hope they assign smarter agents to violent crime and terrorism.
When I was younger I worked as a tech in a major metro newspaper.
Reporters seem to have a overblown sense of self worth. They can't be bothered to go down the hall and talk to lowly "technical" people to find out if what they are saying even makes sense. This seems to happen with reporters at every level. They go on air regularly and make asses of themselves because they are sure they know everything.
You can complain to the paper, but it will just go to a jackass editor that even has a MORE overblown sense of self-worth.
I have heard that defense before, but it sounded more like "Befehl ist Befehl". I don't think it worked that time either.
An arrest warrant... but does it involve raiding the house with "assault rilfes"? (Whatever those are!)
I was always under the assumption that a uniformed officer knocks on your door and hands you a slip of paper to escort you "downtown." Sure there are cases that may warrant a full on raid (expected high power weapons, drugs, etc.) but busting down the doors for porn?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Sure, they want to go home. However, my choices as a law abiding citizen (like the guy in the story here) are to assume it's cops and lie on the floor, or assume it's bad guys and open fire.
Making that choice anything other than tragic is in the hands of the police, not the ordinary citizen. People in their homes have an entirely different class of rights and expectations that makes your traffic stop example not apply.
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. Top that with the large number of outright address mistakes the dumb pigs make, it's ridiculous to think that people and pigs will not continue to get unnecessarily killed when there are mistakes made during investigations that result in this type of entry.
I just hope the pigs don't make that mistake at MY house. I keep a loaded AR-15 near my bed that is fully capable of both shooting through all my walls, but also personal body armor of the police on the other side of those walls*. The idea a law abiding citizen is both harmless and will always know not to shoot is absolutely false. With the behavior of the police in this situation, they damn well SHOULD be worried about going home because appear to have integrated fucking up into just about every investigation. Which in turn greatly increases their chances of getting killed by fault of their own investigation techniques when they cause someone to rightfully defend themselves.
* It also shoots through schools.