A UK man has been fined £500 and given a sentence of 12 months conditional discharge for the sinister crime of accessing somebody else's broadband connection using Wi-Fi. According to news site Silicon.com the man, Gregory Straszkiewicz, aged 24, was found by police in a residential area using residents' wireless broadband connections, apparently having tried to do so several times before.
Using somebody else's wireless network in this way could find you 'guilty of dishonestly obtaining an electronic communications service and possessing equipment for fraudulent use of a communications service', which is exactly the pickle that Straszkiewicz has got himself into. This conviction is likely to raise eyebrows in the computing community, given the seeming innocence of the deed done here.
Currently, it would appear it doesn't matter what you do with a wireless network you aren't authorised to use. So, simply using it to access the Internet could get you arrested, as it did here, with a similar situation resulting in the arrest of a Florida man a few weeks ago. On the other end of the scale Brian Salcedo was sentenced to prison in the US for stealing credit card details using a wireless network. Borrowing broadband and stealing credit cards are quite clearly completely different 'crimes'.
I see a potentially huge problem with arresting people for unauthorised wireless use. If you're in the vicinity of an open, broadcasting, unencrypted wireless access point (which, sadly, is the setup you'll find a lot of the time) and your wireless is enabled, your computer is either going to tell you about the network, or connect to it automatically. In theory that could mean you begin using someone else's wireless network without actually taking action yourself.
So where should the responsibility lie? Obviously nicking wireless broadband is cheeky at best and a crime at worst, but you could liken leaving your wireless network open to leaving your front door open. Somebody might walk in and steal something. That doesn't mean the person is any less of a thief, but you can almost guarantee they wouldn't have done it if the door was closed and locked. Wireless access point owners need to start enabling encryption so that casual wireless users strolling by can't just tap in. If somebody breaks the encryption to gain access, then we're talking about something sinister - they have taken specific action with the intent of hacking a network.
Perhaps some of the responsibility also lies with the access point manufacturers. You could argue that anywhere other than a public hotspot is going to want encryption enabled, so why is encryption disabled by default? Should setting up encryption be one of the first prompts made by an AP during setup?
I expect the conviction of Straszkiewicz will make many wireless users a little more cautious, but I also expect we will see further cases in the future which will test the law and perhaps even encourage some common sense changes to the law, or at the very least shift some responsibility onto the owners of Wi-Fi networks, who should make sure they've made some attempt to stop random folk using their network.
