In the course that I teach on “IT Ethics and the Law”, one of the lectures is devoted entirely to security – hacking (white hat and black), identity theft and so on. I often bring up the topic of the openness of our consumer-electronics world, touching on, among other things, personal Wi-Fi networks and the need to secure them. If I ask about the students’ home networks, there are usually some who say that they don’t need home Wi-Fi and an ISP, as long as their neighbors are leaving their wireless networks unprotected.
When this happens (admittedly, it was once much more prevalent than today), I can’t help challenging the class about the ethics of using a neighbor’s open Wi-Fi signal. I used to be astonished (I no longer am) by the apathy with which students shrug off this question. Invariably I’m confronted with an argument that goes like “If they’re dumb enough to leave their signal unprotected, why shouldn’t I use it? What am I stealing?”
First, let me make this as clear here as I try to do in the classroom: using someone else’s computer resources without their permission IS illegal, according to laws going back to 1984 and reenacted more than once since. It doesn’t matter if the signal is unprotected or not, just as your neighbor doesn’t have to lock his door in order for your act of burglary to be a crime. But no appeal to the law will make any difference to what my group sees as a victimless and undetectable act. To them, setting up a network without a password is tantamount to inviting the neighborhood to log on and start surfing.
So here are the elements of this perfect crime: (1) a victim careless enough to be culpable in his own vulnerability, (2) the apparent absence of harm committed by the perpetrator and (3) the near-impossibility of being detected.
Faced with this thinking, often unanimously argued by a roomful of students, I often feel at a loss of where to begin. (And by the way, this course is taught to continuing-ed students – working adults often in their thirties and forties. NOT teenagers.)
The heart of the matter, of course, is not that you’ve violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, but that you’ve taken something that didn’t belong to you, secretly and without permission, and benefited by it. That feels wrong to me, and I hope it feels wrong to you too.
I recently read a question put to the ‘Ethicist’ columnist of the NY Times, which described a scenario in which a woman failed to shield her laptop from the view of someone (unknown to her, a competitor) in the adjacent airline seat. If she failed to take proper precautions, why shouldn’t I spy on her, the competitor asked, in another variant of the ‘dumb victim’ defense.
I think it’s very dangerous – not to say immoral – for us to lower our standards of good behavior because we perceive the victim to be less smart than we are, as if this somehow invites being taken advantage of. This is ‘blame the victim’ thinking and it is one slippery slope: it can lead us way beyond IT issues to every kind of crime. We should see these phony self-justifications for what they are. Failing to setup a password on a wireless network is NOT an invitation to others to log in for free.
Today, I believe the vast majority of home networks are password protected by default, and most people who set them up know the importance of securing them. So this argument, or at least this specific scenario, occurs less frequently than it once did. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to think clearly and ethically when we encounter the property and resources of others. It’s wrong to take stuff that doesn’t belong to you: I think we were supposed to learn that in Kindergarten.
I'm curious. Have you ever logged on through someone else's Wi-Fi? Tell me about it.
