Buffalo, NY – It was a nightmare scenario: A homeowner forced to lie on the floor while gun-wielding federal law enforcement officers called him a pedophile and pornographer.
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But the Buffalo, N.Y., man was innocent. Someone else had tapped into his wireless Internet router to download child pornography. The homeowner had gotten frustrated trying to set up a password to protect the wireless signal and paid a heavy price.
Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router. More and more, cases are popping up across the country of opportunistic people pirating a wireless signal to commit crimes.
I would recommend to whoever has a wireless router, if you’re not connecting via wifi turn off the wireless. If you do use it, put on WPA-2 encryption with a strong long password. Not your name of address and not a dictionary word either. Something that only makes sense to you, and NEVER give the password to anyone.
How is he to blame for this? Can he really be accused of anything illegal if his connection was used unknonw to him? Is it not possible to check his computer to see that he is innocent?
Ultimately he is not to blame. But meanwhile he had to endure the arrest by armed police until it could be ascertained that he was innocent. The porn was downloaded to HIS IP address.
If he had just done a simple setup in the configuration of his router, he could have collected the IP addresses of everyone who connected through his wireless and assisted the police in capturing the truly guilty parties.