Hello everyone, Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few days you've probably heard about this. http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=157&sid=15279689
In a nutshell, a neighbor used this guys wifi connection to download illegal material. ICE (Why ICE and not the FBI I have no idea), contacted his ISP and found out where he lived. They then brought in the swat team and knocked him around for quite awhile while then confiscated all of his internet connected devices when he didn't relent. It wasn't until they decided that he wasn't the culprit, that they did a little due diligence on the username (looking at other places it had been used), that they finally exercised a modicum of common sense and let the guy go. The media spin on this? Secure your wifi. Secure your wifi? Are you serious? Ok lets think about this for a minute, none of the encryption standards currently used by commercially available home routers are really designed as an authentication medium. They are there simply to encrypt the connection and slow down anyone who might be eavesdropping on the conversation. Most of the proper auth & encrypt combo schemes even if they are available on your router, aren't going to work on the majority of consumer devices, so where does that leave us? I think it's important that we as an informed populace spread the word that the answer here is not to encrypt the connection. The proper answer is that our lawmakers need to raise the level of proof required to obtain and execute a search warrant from IP address to something more damning. An IP address IMHO shouldn't even be considered a preponderance of the evidence, since IP addys are meant to be fluid and changeable, thats one of the principals behind DHCP. Before I try to write my congressperson (as I am encouraging everyone else to do), I wanted to open the floodgates on the discussion so that I can come up with a list of talking points that can be boiled down and condensed into bites that a politician can understand. Also if I'm missing something here, I would love to hear the flipside, since there is always the possibility that I may be mis-informed. Any takers? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
