Queensland Police Targetting Wi-Fi Freeloaders

Have you been downloading gigabytes of porn off your neighbours unsecured Wi-Fi connection? Do you live in Queensland? Then you could be all out of luck, with a report by Asher Moses at the SMH Brett Winterford at ITNews that Queensland police will be pro-actively seeking out unsecured wireless networks to warn homes and businesses that they are open to fraud and identity theft.

The move isn’t so much about catching criminals as it is a pre-emptive strike, by trying to educate people that their networks are unsecure, they can potentially close up the network and make it harder for criminals to log on.

The big question here is that it’s easy for someone to find out if a network is unsecured, but if the Queensland police are testing to see if the network still has a default password enabled (which is just as easy for a hacker to bypass, obviously), then wouldn’t they need to connect to the network in question to find that out? And when they do that, aren’t they then breaking the very law they’re trying to protect?

Still, I guess we can only wait and see how well this whole thing plays out…

(UPDATE: It’s come to my attention that the story was originally broken by Brett Winterford at ITNews. Without going on a tirade as to how newspapers are dying because they refuse to adapt to the net and credit their news sources, I’ve updated the post to acknowledge the original article.)

[ITNews]