wardriving a crime in Florida?

[Jack]

--- Matthew Copple <mcopple at gmail.com> 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?

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