--- Matthew Copple [email protected] wrote:
I think one would have a difficult time prosecuting an individual for merely observing radio waves.
Try telling that to Dish Networks and all those companies that sell Satellite Television services. Although I agree, about it should not be prosecutable.
However bear in mind it may be possible to use the DMCA to prosecute people making/using AM/FM stereos. Since they all require making/using devices that decrypt information.
A wireless card is nothing more than a fancy radio, after all. But jumping on someone's router, pulling an IP and surfing on that person's bandwidth is a deliberate act, not just passively collecting radio waves. That is network intrusion, and that is illegal.
Not necessarily. If my computer with a wi-fi card (or as was pointed out, my cell phone) runs dhcp (since I have a local lan and want to avoid hardcoding addresses), then there is no deliberate act involved in acquiring an IP address. The computer or phone is only doing what it is programmed to do. Hence the mere act of walking past someone's house with my PDA/phone causes me to access any wireless network that is open,
get an ip address and download my mail, et cetera. If we go with your definition of illegal, I can't walk down the street with my PDA, nor in fact could I take my PDA to any number of places I currently do without risking breaking the law unintentionally. So you see it really isn't that simple. But, I was talking about wardriving, and not cellphones with instant internet. Still, if we make one legal then it would be very discriminatory to illegalize the other. After all if I have a wireless network and for some reason my dhcp server goes down and my network then connects to my neighbors wireless, how is that criminal? I may not even become aware of it for a while. I may not even be at home? What if I have scheduled downloads? Am I committing a crime when my server crashes and I'm in Kentucky on business and my automated downloads access my neighbor's wireless, all without my ability to stop it? If that isn't illegal, then why should a wardriver be penalized for doing something just as innocuous?
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com