Debate rages over the legality . . . not to mention the ethics.
The range of possible answers – and there are plenty more we could list – is indicative of the variety of passionately held opinions and legal murk on this question, which gained renewed attention last month.
If you connect to someone else’s open Wi-Fi router and start using that broadband Internet service you are:
a) guilty of stealing from the service provider; b) committing an unethical act; c) really cheap; d) not guilty; or e) all of the above.
The correct answer is wide open to debate. But the range of possible answers – and there are plenty more we could list – is indicative of the variety of passionately held opinions and legal murk on this question, which gained renewed attention last month.
What do you think? Discuss and Wi-Fi Mooching forum.
debate in our
That was when news reports surfaced about the April arrest of Benjamin Smith , who St. Petersburg, Fla., police allege “wilfully, knowingly and without authorization” accessed a home Wi-Fi network from a parked car in front of someone’s house.
Depending on your viewpoint, Smith was stealing, mooching, hijacking, sharing, borrowing or just using the homeowner’s Internet connection. As we learned in interviews with Wi-Fi users and others, thinking on this subject is continually changing.
New worries or no worries
Homes and small businesses have been the fastest-growing market for wireless LAN (WLAN ) equipment over the past couple of years, and users are now starting to know enough about wireless either to worry about having an open access point or to not worry.
A Jupiter Research survey last year of consumers with wireless home networks found the top concerns were identity theft, eavesdropping and virus attacks. Yet some users actually encourage shared use, even though nearly all service providers forbid it in their broadband contracts. One example is Newbury Open Net , which is a free, open WLAN spanning the length of Boston’s tony Newbury Street.
Using an unprotected wireless link is very easy and seems to cause no harm, some say. Elizabeth Weinberg, who now works in a New York custom photo lab, was living off-campus in Boston during her senior year in college. She and two roommates didn’t want to pay an extra $20 each per month for broadband service. Then came the siren song of a solid Wi-Fi signal from somewhere in the apartment building.
“My roommate had an [Apple] iBook and it was picking up a high signal,” she says. “We said, ‘We’ll just go with it.’ “
Neither she nor her two roommates had any qualms. “I never encountered anyone with moral objections to this,” Weinberg says. “The Internet is so ingrained in my generation it’s like ‘oh yeah, grab it.’ We’re not harming anyone.”
For Hilary Meserve, a teacher in Philadelphia, and her two roommates it was, in a sense, Comcast’s fault. The trio shared the cost and ordered broadband service through Comcast. It never worked. “We’d call them,” she says. “They said we were programming the wrong number, or doing something else. There was always something that was wrong. Finally, we said ‘forget it.’ “
All three roommates had wireless cards and found a “pretty good signal” from a nearby WLAN. “All three of us used it for the entire year,” Meserve says. When she relocated to another part of the city, she did the same thing.
The ethical presumption
Using someone’s open wireless network should not be a crime, according to Jennifer Granick, executive director for the center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School .
“First, as a user, you don’t know if you’re invited to use that [open] wireless network or not,” Granick says. “Such use might be allowed, even encouraged.”
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“It’s not easy to say that the ethical presumption should be against access” of an unprotected wireless network, says Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The group’s San Francisco headquarters has a WLAN and lets anyone use it. “Right now, we [as a society] don’t have a way of saying ‘Even though my wireless signal is open, I’m saying you can’t use it.'”
Nearly all broadband providers forbid subscribers from voluntarily sharing a DSL or cable modem connection outside the home. “It’s obviously not good for Verizon to have its services given away for free, just as a cable company wouldn’t want someone funneling their cable connection next door,” says a Verizon spokeswoman. Verizon’s DSL Terms of Service and its Acceptable Use Policy prohibit such sharing. Speakeasy is one of the providers that explicitly allows the practice.
A second reason to tread carefully in outlawing such use is that the laws against computer and network access, as applied to wireless, often are too vague and leave too much discretion to police and prosecutors, according to Granick. “We don’t want to create a broad class of people who are ‘criminals’ and then let prosecutors pick and choose which ones they want to go after,” she says.
No moral agreement
Finally, it’s still an open question about the morality of such access. “There’s not a moral agreement in society that this is wrong,” Granick says. “It’s more like a regulatory decision, such as [requiring] driving a car with a driver’s license. We treat those kinds of offenses differently” from robbery or assault.
But shouldn’t the law protect the many users who are ignorant of technical details, and of the risks they face with an unprotected wireless access point?
“You can’t really protect people that way,” says Paul Holman, a principal in The Shmoo Group , a Seattle group of security professionals who collaborate in their spare time on educating users about computer and network security. “If I access your wireless net and hack into your home computer and read files, we already have laws that make all of that wrong and illegal and bad. And I agree with all that. But we don’t need government to regulate Wi-Fi.”
Holman says society can apply those current laws, educate consumers, and go after WLAN vendors that continue to ship products with security settings switched off. “They’ve consistently chosen not to do this,” he says. “We should make them turn this on or at least have a better [security] setup feature.”
The Florida arrest of Smith could have a highly educative effect, says Patrick McCormick, former CIO for the city of Somerville, Mass., and a co-founder of Boston Wireless Advocacy Group , which promotes and helps create open public wireless networks. People are becoming smarter about networking, he says, and the public discussion will make people aware of the risks and remedies they have with wireless networks.
It’s this kind of awareness that will “inform people about how these new technologies should be used,” McCormick says.
And that’s just what happened with Wi-Fi users Weinberg and Meserve. Weinberg now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and has a broadband service and a wireless router, which she has locked up with a password. Why? “Because I know there are people out there like myself, who would use it, given the opportunity,” she says. “And I feared it would make my connection slower.”
Meserve’s practice changed when she found that her Amazon.com account had been hacked. “I was looking at this [issue] then as, ‘If you’re dumb enough to leave it open, then the heck with it,'” she says. “But since my experience of being hacked, I’ve changed my mind. And also because this [issue] is a bigger deal now. Like downloading songs: Everyone was doing it, until people started getting caught. So I wouldn’t do it again.”
