Recently an innocent homeowner had his door kicked in, was thrown down the stairs and called a child pornographer and a pedophile by the police.
The homeowner was innocent.
The response across the board has been, “Secure your WiFi or this could happen to you!”
NO!
There is no legal or moral imperative to secure a WiFi access point. Open APs are common. Lots of people like to share their Internet access and many businesses use them to attract customers. Do you suppose that if the offending IP had been traced to a Starbucks there would have been a midnight raid?
This was a result of poor investigation by the police. The proper response is to hold the police responsible and accountable for their mistakes. The “secure your wifi” response is that of a police state. “Don’t do anything that looks guilty or you’ll get the midnight door kick!”
I’m not interested in making the cops job’s easier. There is no crime so heinous that we should allow the innocent to be invaded in their homes. If some evidence gets destroyed or the guilty sometimes go free then that’s just the cost of being secure in your home. We pay lip service to the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty, but midnight raids by militarized police put the lie to that.
At least the KGB were polite enough to knock on the door at midnight.
I haven’t seen anything that would indicate the suspect was dangerous or would be a danger to those serving a search warrant.
Nothing!
I could possibly see it if he had also downloaded instructions on how to booby trap your house or how to make bombs or defend against a SWAT raid.
I think it is going to take many more cases of innocent people being victims of no-knock warrants before this stops.
No, it will take a citizen shooting a LEO during a no-knock raid and then being held blameless and non-liable by the courts.
Only problem with shooting an LEO is you will NOT survive the raid… what it’s going to take is cities losing BIG $$ in courts, that will at least slow them down…
Heard that the NYC Public Library is okay with their Computers being used for looking at Internet Porn. Wonder how many Pervs sit there every day, trolling for Kiddie Porn? Doesn’t that mean that the NYPD has the right to send in a Tac Team and seize the Library’s Servers, or are the Gestapo only going after Private IP addresses, and letting the Tax Payer Funded IP’s slide?
I don’t secure the wifi in my home, I have visitors with smart phones and no cell service in the house. I do change the admin password on router so no one secures the network for me though. And if the three neighbors close enough to use my wifi with a directional antenna can feel free as long as they don’t use to much ban width. If they do I’ll just set up the upside-down-ternet
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A rouge cop in the Child Porn enforcement team drives near your house, cracks your WEP codes (not that hard these days) downloads and uploads a ton of CP. If you have any shared folders on your internal network the CP can magically show up there. Return to the station and subpoenas your IP records and raids your home. You have all most no defense, who’s going to believe that your AP security what cracked.
I would say that is some ways the AP router security can be a major detriment in a legal defense.
And yet again another no-knock raid that could have perfectly be served with a door knock and a warrant.
If the evidence can be destroyed in the time it takes to knock on the door and serve a warrant, then you are going after too small a fish to really bother.
@Old NFO, I figure that if one is not going to survive the raid they should make a big enough crater than the raiders don’t survive either.
Yep, Joe, one of the maximum fantasies on my ultimate wish list is to have a couple or three tons of RDX in the basement connected to a deadman switch under my ass on the Barcalounger, so I just say, “Hi, guys, door ain’t locked, come on in! Want a beer?”
Same thing others have pointed out: not one thing in this justified these clowns getting out their door-kickers and making a ‘dynamic entry’; a simple knock on the door and “Sir, I have a warrant…” would have sufficed.
But that’s not nearly as dramatic and fun as dressing up and committing a legal home invasion, is it?
And I wonder if they paid for the damage they did?
…assuming he survives…
Had that happen in my town back in the late 80s when the cop shop had just started doing no-knock-raids. They decided to take-down a local drug dealer at 3AM in his home while he was sleeping. They busted down the door, tossed flash-bangs and began the standard yelling madly. He woke up, grabbed his pistol and shot one of the cops in the arm right where the body armor wasn’t, bullet going in from the side. Killed him.
Charged the dealer with killing a cop. Jury let him go because the cop’s reason for using FBs, busting doors down at 3AM and yelling wildly was “to disorient the subject” so that he wouldn’t know what was happening. Jury found that his defense, of being disoriented and shooting to defend his family when confronted with a gun-wielding, home-invasion assailant was justified. Despite his illegal occupation.
I don’t like what he does and I feel sorry for the cop’s family, BUT, the jury was correct to hammer the cops and their ninja, para-military mentality.
Could you please provide a link or enough info for me to search that incident? I could really use it in my “Legal Aspects of Law Enforcement” term paper-