[geeks] Unsecured Wifi connections now illegal in part of India.

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> How is this harassing people? The Gov't is requiring folks with wireless
> access points to set them to be secure.

What if the owners of those access points don't want them to have a
password?  I didn't have one on mine for the longest because I don't mind
sharing my connection.  It's not like I can save up the bandwidth when I'm
not home so that I can use it later.

> It is a zero-cost effort.  You and I may bristle at the requirement, but
> we both live in the USA, not Mumbai, and all those wonderful
> constitutional protections we have here don't really apply there.

I don't recall making any reference to the US constitution.  It seems like
a pretty impotent document to me.  It's either permitted all the
government encroachment US citizens live under all the expansions of
executive and legislative power we've seen in the last several decades,
and all the recent terror witch-hunting nonsense, or it has been powerless
to prevent it.

> The Gov't wants to make it harder to transmit data annonymously from
> random points in the city.

And that will stop nothing.  It's just yet another government doing
"something" to look like they have some modicum of control over the
situation.  And, whom are they exerting this control against?  Terrorists?
No, regular folks who didn't do anything wrong.  Just like usual.

> They didn't outlaw WiFi, and they didn't say you can't share the
> password/code.

They've effectively outlawed WiFi unless the access point is run in a
manner the government approves.

>> If all the wireless network devices in India had spontaneously self-
>> destructed before the Mumbai attack had occurred, the terrorists
>> wouldn't have said "Oh, shit. To bad we can't figure out how to
>> communicate and blow stuff up without WiFi. Let's go home for tea,
>> instead."
>
> No, but they likely would have used a form of communication that gov't
> has hooks into and can monitor looking for suspect activity (rather
> than fish through exabytes of wireless data per year)

Do you really think that governments are effective at stopping any but the
most bumbling of terrorists, despite all the evidence to the contrary?
America's own State Department can't even run an internal email service
that can shrug off a few bureaucrats clicking "Reply to All".  You think
that India, with four times the population, some incredible level of
population density, and probably nowhere near the snooping infrastructure
of the US can keep tabs on everyone?

>> People will do bad things. This alone is insufficient cause to harass
>> people who are not doing bad things.
>
> Securing a WiFi access point is far from harassment.

It depends on what the "or else" is.  If there's an "or else", wouldn't
you consider that harassment?

If there's no "or else", it depends on how often people will be reminded
to password-protect their equipment.  If the owner of the access point
gets to look forward to a friendly reminder about his insecure network
every couple of days, wouldn't you consider that harassment?

> A few years ago, several folks took over some jumbo jets and did some
> bad things with them, as a response to that, the federal government in
> the US (and others I suppose) required commercial airliners to have
> secure cockpit doors. That wasn't considered harassment as I recall.

The commercial airlines take government payouts.  They've sold themselves
into whatever asinine regulations the government feels like laying on
them.

That said, after that day in 2001, they could've put shower curtains up
instead of reinforced doors, and I don't there'd be a single passenger who
would let anyone up to the cockpit who looked like he was trying to start
trouble.

> they are requiring citizens to not make it easy for folks to have
> "secret" communications from "annonymous" locations.

In a city as large as Mumbai, that's something of a laughable goal.  It's
very easy to be anonymous in a crowd.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "I'll be long gone before some smart person ever
Elgin, TX         (  figures out what happened inside this Oval Office."
USA               (                                     --George W. Bush