Nebraska Sheriff Wardriving, Sending Letters About Unsecured Wi-Fi

An anonymous reader sends this quote from JournalStar.com: "The Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office has seen an increase in scammers using unsecured Wi-Fi connections to steal identities and mask their crimes during the past six months, Sheriff Terry Wagner said. ... So deputies spent the past few weeks finding unsecure connections and sending 40 to 50 letters to let people know about the potential dangers of strangers accessing their network connections. 'You're just opening yourself up for a series of potential pitfalls,' Chief Deputy Jeff Bliemeister said. ... Bliemeister said only businesses like coffee shops that offer Internet connections to customers need unsecured Internet connections.

Comments

Re:How do they know exactlywhere to send the lette

[AK Marc]

Ohh BTW there are more then one cities in the county.

How about "There is more than one city in the county." You must be from Nebraska or something.

Re:Utter Horse-shit!

[Penurious Penguin]

Why intimidate others into conforming to one (reasonably-disputed) perspective? If the sheriff had distributed passive, informative information, I would condone the effort, but disagree with the premise. Instead, intimidation was used without exploring other possibilities. The number of people committing serious "cyber"-crimes is too low to warrant this level of paranoia, especially when sporting a WEP-key does little to prevent it.

We have all sorts of buzzards poking around in our personal data, whether we've ever done anything objectionable or not. Most of these buzzards happen to be doing so "legally". It surprises me that people would be concerned about their neighbors -- which are with great likeliness indifferent -- but pay no attention to the gross and potentially harmful privacy-violations taking place en masse through officially sanctioned sources. This smacks of deformed priorities.