Dear Peter,

In your entry on EFF’s Deeplinks blog you have laid out a case for “Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement.”

I genuinely applaud the enthusiasm you have shown in the article calling for more open wifi routers. Many of your sentiments I share. However there’s one huge problem I see with gaining wide-scale public support in this endeavour.

Objections based on bandwidth sharing aside (I don’t personally care if others use my connection on a bandwidth basis, I can throttle/traffic shape my routers), the big issue I see is the FBI knocking down doors and confiscating equipment and rarely if ever returning it while also inflicting a huge cost on the accused both in money and time with no guarantees of vindication in the event of innocence.

I used to run an open network. It was completely segregated from the rest of my network at home and it was throttled. The problem I began to realise was that the idea of Safe harbor provisions in law aren’t even thought about when the FBI wants to publicly flog someone in a raid (whether the raid is even warranted or not.) I realised that I couldn’t afford in money, time and possible risk of my employment (since my employment depends on a background check usually) if some Government agent decided based on an ip address alone that I was (fill in the blank for internet bogeymen according to the Government/RIAA/MPAA etc.)

Safe harbors don’t get your home servers/laptops/desktops/iphones/ipods etc. back from the FBI any faster and they don’t stop people from assuming you are a paedophile when accused of it. The FBI/Secret Service/ICE/Judges presiding over these cases have a long history of misunderstanding technology at the expense of the accused and I don’t have the money or the resources to fight that big of a legal battle – even coming from a family with lawyers in it.

When that stops, I may consider an open wifi router. In the meantime while the Government is trigger happy it may be better to push for more public infrastructure for available open wifi. As a matter of practicality I have no ability or want to end up with a legal battle that could threaten my employment when the liability for the service provided in an open wifi looms above me personally. That’s more properly left to public-owned infrastructure.

Ultimately, I think that’s your biggest hurdle in convincing people to open their routers up. It’s not the social responsibility you need to convince people of, and I don’t even think it’s the inevitable cries of “but.. but… socialism!” that will be thrown against this idea. What needs to change is a fundamental approach to the Government’s view of technology and the rights of individuals. Ask any Government agent today if a private citizen enjoys the same safe harbours as an ISP and I am willing to bet their answer is no (whether that’s actually true or not.)

When the FBI stops breaking down doors and ICE stops seizing domains over civil matters (paedophile accusations are of course criminal, however) and when Law Enforcement stops acting as the strong arm enforcer for private companies over intellectual property while simultaneously demonstrating a marked misunderstanding of the technology they are dealing with you may be successful in this endeavour. The mere prospect of going through what the person in your referenced NPR story did is enough to chill any positive response to this.

Even Bruce Schneier (who is referenced in your article as a trailblazer in running an open wifi router) said as much:

“As I’ve written before, I run an open WiFi network. It’s stories like these that may make me rethink that.”

So how do we approach fundamentally changing law enforcement’s views/actions? I don’t see their actions changing much since the days of Steve Jackson’s case against the Secret Service and in fact, one could argue they’re more invasive and more of a burden to the accused now that civil trials such as that of George Hotz are also imposing ridiculous confiscations of hardware and demanding the identities of everyone who viewed his video (whether that was awarded or not.)

In light of all these things, the average person is most certainly going to think “I don’t want to risk that.” It’s not bandwidth sharing, or possibly having your laptops/home servers hacked that is the major hurdle to public acceptance. John/Jane Q. Doe doesn’t have the ability to fight these legal battles, even with the ACLU and EFF’s existence, because the fallout is longer lasting than the outcome of the legal battle. This is especially true if the public accusations of the government are falsely placed and also engender community vitriol at the mere invocation of certain types of charges. Many of my jobs as a Systems Administrator/Engineer require a background check and were I to be targeted for investigation for my open wifi router I have no guarantee of exoneration (which puts future employment at risk) nor could I conceivably take the time off required to fight a legal battle.

My suggestions are to focus on more local-government-sponsored public wifi infrastructure. This would negate the liability to the private individual providing such a service. Were we to get very ambitious, we could lobby that this type of open wifi infrastructure be part of Obama’s proposal to get broadband to the entire country. I think this idea has a greater chance of success than asking people to possibly be raided by the FBI for things someone did while on their personally-paid for connection.

It is admirable to call for fundamental changes for the community better, but it may be problematic in today’s current realities in regards to Government Agencies and their views on law/IP enforcement to ask for people to open their wireless routers.

Cheers,

-D

(CC’ed to Peter’s listed email at the EFF.)

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Original article @EFF’s blog