So a man in Michigan has been fined $400 and given 40 hours of community service for piggybacking off a coffee shop’s wireless network without actually going into the coffee shop:
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.
He used the system on his lunch breaks for more than a week, and then the police showed up.
“I was sitting there reading my e-mail and he came up and stuck his head inside my window and asked me who I was spying on,” Peterson told FOXNews.com.
Someone from a nearby barbershop had called cops after seeing Peterson’s car pull up every day and sit in front of the coffee shop without anybody getting out.
“I just curiously asked him, ‘Where are you getting the Internet connection?’, you know,” Sparta Police Chief Andrew Milanowski said. “And he said, ‘From the café.’”
Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken.
“We came back and we looked up the laws and we figured if we found one and thought, ‘Well, let’s run it by the prosecutor’s office and see what they want to do,’” Milanowski said.
Ok, so the guy broke the law and the police caught him. But there is something that just doesn’t sit well with me when I read this story. Instead of simply telling the man he’s not allowed to surf the Wi-Fi near the coffee shop, the police went looking for a law that was broken because they simply *had a feeling* a law had been broken:
Milanowski ruled out Peterson as a possible stalker of the attractive local hairdresser, but still felt that a law might have been broken.
So I feel like the police, in an effort to make the surrounding people feel “safe,” simply went law shopping until they actually found a law they could hit the guy with. For some reason, this does not sit well with me and feels so unjustified. It’s like the police used some type of “ex post facto” enforcement scheme. I mean, just because you have the feeling a law has been broken, doesn’t mean one actually has been. Yeah, the man was doing something illegal under the law, but the police went back and made sure they found a violation they could deliberately hit him with. This just doesn’t sit well.