Bill Kearney wrote:
My home system is "1540 Jackson Ave" which is my address. The
assumption is that someone wanting to use my system can bang on the
door and ask permission. My office SSID uses the company name.

Which raises the question, if someone uses your access point without
permission are you within your rights to do whatever you please with the
packets (and their contents) you detect?

Is a unsecured wifi AP more like putting some benches on the sidewalk in
front of your house or a house with an unlocked front door?

This would a good example where the "law" isn't settled.

Unlike the door example, where there is millenia of houses and doorways
to establish a fairly common understanding of boundaries and permissions
required (and even then, it varies among places, right?)

To a first order, if you own one endpoint of the link (i.e the AP), then
you get to look at what its carrying. Unless you're a "common carrier"
or "utility" sort of organization.

And how far does YOUR liability extend, if, say, that miscreant out
front is using your AP to organize a terrorist plot? ISPs have a "safe
harbor": if they don't look at the content, they're not responsible.

Or, does having that open AP give you plausible deniability, and the
SODDI (Some other dude did it) defense... Hey man, it wasn't me
downloading copyrighted music to that IP, it must have been some other
dude with a laptop in a car out front. Bummer that I don't have any
traffic logs.


Seems fair, steal my airwaves and I'll steal your data in return.