The Fifth Circuit of the US Court of Appeals has ruled that having a wifi network is not an alibi for content downloaded via your ip address. In a case regarding child pornography as its illegal content, a man tried and disproved an old theory that keeping your wireless internet access point (WAP) open was a free pass to download anything. The reasoning being, since the network is open, it could've been anyone.
Actually it couldn't have. This article neglects to mention the MAC address assigned to every computer's ethernet port. It's like a fingerprint unique to each machine that is used in electronic transmission so the routers know where to send what information. So trying to say his IP address was unverifiable was fair, but there was still probable cause.
The danger in this case comes from the next step legislators are considering taking: Making using an open network, or having one, a crime. This is a premise that has been pursued by ISPs in the past, who are not fond of free internet sharing. There should be a distinction made between having the capacity to commit a crime and actually committing it. I completely disagree with the thought-police-esque pre-emptive action approach. It's like arresting someone for practicing karate because they could kill, or arresting someone for selling goods because they could be robbed.
However, an area is left open for speculation: Just how anonymous can the internet be? Should we need to use our government-issued IDs to log onto the internet, or is the open model acceptable? While my usual "Information wants to be free" approach would say it's impossible to force identification on the internet, at the same time it has been considered. But since MAC addresses are trackable, how anonymous is the internet anyway? Sure, you can browse the internet, set up accounts from a library. But you can't share illegal files, or run 3rd party p2p applications. I don't know if this is a widespread practice, but in a way, by limiting what programs a library computer can run, a library can set a standard of censorship. Quite contrary to the standard librarian fare, if you ask me.
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2 comments:
While they did find child porn in his room, it was his roommate's registered Y! account that sent it. From that article, it seems like they aren't even looking into the roommate all that much?
In a sense, I wouldn't mind an internet where you need to sign on using government ID... Only for the simple fact that it would be so much simpler to catch child abductors, child predators, child porn rings and the like. I wouldn't mind a world where we can easily find those people and get them off the streets and the 'nets.
But once we give the gov. a right to track all our internet use, wouldn't that open the pandora's box of potential for them to abuse that power?
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