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

guilty eh?

[rainmouse]

Guilty until proven innocent.

Re:guilty eh?

[bobdawonderweasel]

Indeed. This case has far more to do with the actions of police state than a criminal investigation. When will these morons in law enforcement learn: IP Address != Identity.

Re:guilty eh?

[MickyTheIdiot]

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.

Re:guilty eh?

[LWATCDR]

That story was confirmation for you? Some guy posting on slashdot?
Here is documented proof that it has been that way for a long time.
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-07/new-york-times-nasa-youre-right-rockets-do-work-space

The background story is that New York time wrote an editorial in 1920 lambasting a Professor named Robert Goddard for writing an scientific paper where he had the nerve to suggest that humans could someday use one of the liquid fueled rockets he was working on to send a machine to the moon. Well at least he didn't suggest that a person could go. I mean that would have been just insane. Robert Goddard had what little support he had dry up and was publicly humiliated so he worked in secret out in New Mexico. One does wonder what he might have done if the Times had supported is bold idea?
Did the Time bother to write a retraction when V2s where falling on London? No.
Did they write a retraction before Robert Goddard's death? No.
Did they even bother to write a retraction when Sputnik was launched? No.
They waited until man walked on the Moon.
Reporters are indoctrinated that they are the protectors of our freedom and that it is there job to explain things to us. Too bad they are not taught to just gather and report facts so that we can figure out what they mean for ourselves.

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:guilty eh?

[snsh]

I'm sure the cops shouted 'pornographer!' and 'pedophile!' at the suspect out of self defense. After you call someone a pedophile, they cannot possibly hurt you, according to the Pedophile Code of Honor.

Re:guilty eh?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

with kinetic resistance

You're a moron, and your cute euphemism doesn't hide that. More "kinetic resistance" is only going to justify and encourage this kind of response from the police, and not dissuade it.

Call me a bleeding liberal if you will, but the police are more afraid of lawsuits than they are of armed individual resistance. The latter they have training and material to deal with. The former they don't, and civil penalties deprive them of resources to continue criminal acts with.

Re:guilty eh?

[jafiwam]

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.

Re:guilty eh?

[Slashdot Parent]

Do you know how many cops are killed every year? 48 was in 2009 over 3/4 of them at traffic stops.(speeding suspected drunk driving, etc)

There are 800,000 law enforcement officers in the US, so we're talking about 0.006% here. Assuming the officer has a 10 mi. commute, he has a greater chance of getting killed on the way into the office or "home to their spouse's[sic] at the end of their shift" (0.007%).

Yawn.

Search Warrant?

[wsxyz]

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?

Re:Search Warrant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if he was guilty, there wasn't a good reason to attack him with a military unit of the police because his proclivities are abhorrent. Why couldn't regular cops handle the warrant? He wasn't accused of buying machine guns after all.

Re:Search Warrant?

[rbollinger]

First Point: ICE raided the house not the police.

Second Point: ICE needs to have a federally issued warrant in order to raid a house.

Honestly it is the Judges that need the wake-up call. Too many just don't understand the intricacies of technology and internet crime. A Judge would have been shown how ICE had tracked the IP back to a specific person, and he should have known that that IP address doesn't necessarily identify that person as the perpetrator, and denied the warrant. Furthermore, he should realize that by authorizing a raid like that he reduced the chance of actually catching the real criminal. If the neighbor wasn't such a bone-head, he would have realized what was going on, and fled after he saw the raid on his neighbor's apartment. Instead he probably though he had successfully pinned the blame on someone else.

So rather than

[Stargoat]

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?

Wrong Damn Point

[dcollins]

"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.

Guest Wi-Fi

[tepples]

...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?

This is a cautionary tale...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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?

cautionary tale indeed

[spikenerd]

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?

Re:Duh

[heptapod]

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.

Re:Land of the free...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gov't: Hey we are planning a raid on your house next week what time would work for you for us to swing by?

You: I'm kinda busy this week. I have some computers I need to toss out. How bout you swing by next Thursday

Govt: Ok see you then

Re:But I want to share

[spikenerd]

Then let them knock on your door and ask you for the WEP key...

No. Who are you to tell me how to do it? If this is a free nation, I'll do it however I want. If I want to shine their shoes as they use my Internet connection, I'll do that too. It's none of your business how I choose to do it.

Re:Duh

[MoonBuggy]

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...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Might as well be open

[SoTerrified]

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."

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.

For more information.