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

[Lionel Peterson]

   Jan 12, 2009 09:50:44 PM, geeks at sunhelp.org wrote:
   On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Lionel Peterson wrote:
   >>> Dang, these governments have it all figured out. They should just
   >>> outlaw terrorism, so that there won't be anymore terrorists.
   >>
   >> Better they should ignore that this may be how terrorists were able
   to
   >> communicate?
   >Yes.
   >How many exabytes of data per year are transmitted via unsecured
   802.11
   >connections, and how much of that data is terrorism-related? For that
   >matter, how -trivial- is it to crack WEP and WPA-Personal?
   The Gov't wants to make it harder to transmit data annonymously from
   random points in the city. They didn't outlaw WiFi, and they didn't
   say you can't share the password/code.
   >Let's license paper and ink, too, since I hear terrorist print
   training
   >manuals on them. And let's not allow people to have access to
   unsecured
   >ideo cameras that might be used to case targets for an attack.
   >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)
   >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.
   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.
   >To put it another way: those terrorists likely moved explosives along
   >"unsecured" roads. Should we place checkpoints along all roads?
   Not a reasonable comparison - the gov't is not monitoring the WiFi
   activity, they are requiring citizens to not make it easy for folks to
   have "secret" communications from "annonymous" locations.
   Lionel