techweb.com — A man in Illinois was parked in front of a home with an open WiFi signal borowing some Internet access when a cop stoped to ask him what he was doing. The war driver told the cop what and how he was doing it and got arrested for breaking a littel know law in Illinios.
Mar 25, 2006 View in Crawl 4
masterdwarfMar 26, 2006
I could never understand innocent people subjecting themselves to searches, or saying things they shouldnt when it comes to the law. Their argument, "I have nothing to hide." Well then the po-lice dont need to search your stuff. Probable cause is a catch phrase, dont let them get away with it.
sonicdevoMar 26, 2006
Except that there's no stealing going on here... not to nitpick, but if you're talking about a legal matter, use correct legal jargon.
danatkinsonMar 26, 2006
When will people stop posting news about these things?Lots of people get arrested for remotely accessing other peoples computers without permission. Wardriving itself is not illegal - yet - and so this news article is actually misleading.
cjmemayMar 26, 2006
"I am just tired of taking extra time trying to understand this ebonics/illiterate writing I am exposed to on a daily basis.""I am also tired of people trying to get themselves noticed with stories that are cutting edge, especially if they don't know enough about the subject matter."What a hypocritical, RACIST sentiment. By the way, Ebonics is capitalized.
curtis1984Mar 26, 2006
You literally have to be a complete idiot to get caught so obviously. When the officer sees you working with your laptop in your car, you immediately close the laptop. Officer asks what you are doing, u say "working", he says "on what", u say "U got a warrant?" he has no probable cause to search u and doesn't know if you were working on a document or hacking into NASA... nothing left for the officer to do but leave
ehrichweissMar 26, 2006
Wireless is a paradox to the law because of something peculiar about it: if I drive around with my laptop on and I pass your WAP, without any human intervention it makes BOTH of us criminals by your standards. Did you know that? Your WAP will send my laptop some packets trying to identify it, and my laptop will send your WAP some packets to identify it(this is majorly simplified for the intellectually challenged so don't chime in about how I have this all wrong, etc.). That counts as illegally accessing a network by the law's definition.And just so you'll know, leaving a WAP open IS a defense and CAN get you out of charges if someone does something on your network that's illegal because you take a "common carrier" status; what it won't do is keep you from being harassed in the first place as you will have to do some footwork to show it was entirely possible it was someone besides you. ISP's have this same defense and not-so-surprisingly, it works for them too.
tlarsethAug 8, 2007
In the State of Illinois in order to be prosecuted for illegally tapping into a wifi connection the connection has to be protected somehow, weither or not it is a password, WAP encryption, Firewalled, or the such...meaning he had to hack this protection to be liable for it. I know from personal expirience on this matter, as my business used to open broadcast our wifi for our office, since our security suite software would block actual access to the computers, but since there was no actual protection on the wifi, we could not prosecute a specific individual for tapping off of the wifi since it was an "open" broadcast. If you can get in trouble for that, the new T-Mobile wifi system would be illegal here, since it uses customers wifi broadcasts to help make a specific town wifi accessable for the T-Mobile Hot-spot plan.