Well, that's sort of what it boils down to (link , via):
He got on the Internet by tapping into the local coffee shop's wireless network, but instead of going inside the shop to use the free Wi-Fi offered to paying customers, he chose to remain in his car and piggyback off the network, which he said didn't require a password.
The interesting part of the story, to me at least, is the alleged age of the law in question:
The law, introduced in 1979 to protect Internet and private-network users from hackers, and amended in 2000 to include wireless systems, makes piggybacking off of Wi-Fi networks, even those without a password, illegal
Emphasis mine there. I'll let you figure out why that seems a little odd for yourselves.
This doesn't actually surprise me and to an extent I can understand why he's been prosecuted: as far as the prosecutors and police are concerned that access point was for paying customers of the cafe, not for any old Joe on the street. I suppose in their eyes it's like using one of the tables in the cafe itself – you'd expect to have to pay for the right to sit there, though once you'd bought your latte or whatever you could stay for as long as you like. On the other hand you can still go into a cafe and use the bathroom without paying for a drink first, can't you?
Morally it's a grey area. I'd love to be able to say "it was open, so therefore he should just be allowed to use it," but on the other hand I can see the argument that says that someone's door being open doesn't give you the right to go inside and watch their TV for half an hour.
Oh come now! Do the police really need to be harassing citizens this way? When computers sign on automatically to whatever open network that happens to be in the area. Talk about a victimless crime. I’d say comparing it to walking into someone’s open house and sitting down is a bit of a stretch. Nobody’s going to feel ‘violated’ over a logon to their open WiFi network.
Talk about a victimless crime.
Ah, but that’s the very problem here. This was a victimless crime, yes, but suppose that he’d been sat out there downloading kiddie porn or doing any number of other illegal internet-related things. More importantly, what if he’d been doing that and nobody had spotted him doing it? In that case, who would have been held to account for the misuse of the internet connection? The owners of the hotspot, one must presume.
I’m not saying that the police were right to do what they did, because in context it was an overreaction. That the police assumed he must be doing something wrong before actually going and finding a crime with which to charge him speaks for itself.
What this highlights, IMO, is an issue of legislation. Just because a wifi network is unencrypted, does that make it open to all and sundry? And if it does, who is responsible for how it is used?
In an ideal world we’d all be able to use any open connections we found with impunity and there would never be any consequences because no-one would misuse them. Truth is, though, that people misuse them all the time and in today’s surveillance society we can’t seriously expect to have the freedoms that we might expect to be able to expect. (That sentence makes sense, I promise).