Copper Robot: Mitch Wagner's old blog – go to www.MitchWagner.com

Here’s the headline: Innocent Man Accused Of Child Pornography After Neighbor Pirates His WiFi.

The story:

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Lying on his family room floor with assault weapons trained on him, shouts of “pedophile!” and “pornographer!” stinging like his fresh cuts and bruises, the Buffalo homeowner didn’t need long to figure out the reason for the early morning wake-up call from a swarm of federal agents.

That new wireless router. He’d gotten fed up trying to set a password. Someone must have used his Internet connection, he thought.

“We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night,” the man’s lawyer, Barry Covert, recounted the agents saying. They referred to a screen name, “Doldrum.”

“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “Somebody else could have but I didn’t do anything like that.”

“You’re a creep … just admit it,” they said.

Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale.

You’re damn right it is! It’s a cautionary tale that the Buffalo SWAT team is dangerous and out of control, going in armed for an Al Qaeda stronghold and terrorizing law-abiding citizens.

Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. Their advice: Password-protect your wireless router.

Wait, what?

Plenty of others would agree. The Sarasota, Fla. man, for example, who got a similar visit from the FBI last year after someone on a boat docked in a marina outside his building used a potato chip can as an antenna to boost his wireless signal and download an astounding 10 million images of child porn, or the North Syracuse, N.Y., man who in December 2009 opened his door to police who’d been following an electronic trail of illegal videos and images. The man’s neighbor pleaded guilty April 12.

No, no, no, the lesson here is not that unlocked Wi-Fi is dangerous. The danger from unlocked Wi-Fi is minimal. How many cases can you think of where someone has used unlocked Wi-Fi for wrongdoing? I can think of two in the nine years or so that it’s been available. That’s about the same as none at all, given how many unsecured Wi-Fi access points are out there.

Whereas, as the AP notes, we’ve had numerous cases of militant Rambo-wannabes with badges terrorizing innocent citizens.

Reason Magazine notes:

I can certainly think of some lessons we might draw. One might be: Maybe the cops should check to see if a suspect’s wireless network is secure, and therefore that they have the right guy, before they break into his home and point their guns at his head.

Another lesson: Maybe it’s not such a good idea to send the SWAT team after someone suspected of downloading—not even manufacturing—child porn in the first place. Are people who download kiddie porn known to be heavily armed?

Also:

The New Orleans police department is so corrupt that the federal government has taken over. “The New Statesman’s report on NOLA’s version of justice sounds like something out of Baghdad or a Mexican border town or a wild west novel about corrupt frontier towns,” writes Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing. Incidents include a case where a 31-year-old African-American man was shot by a police sniper while picking up goods behind a shopping mall during Katrina.

He was taken by his brother, a friend and a passer-by to a nearby school that police were using as a special operations centre. There a Swat team let Glover bleed to death and beat his rescuers. Another policeman took the body in the rescuer’s car to the levee and torched it, putting two shots into the body (he later called that ‘a very bad decision’). The incinerated car with Glover’s remains inside it lay a block from the police station for weeks.

The New Statesman article adds:

That the police force in New Orleans is “a significant threat to the safety of the public”, as the DoJ says, is obvious. But the same problems can be seen all over the South, from Miami to Mississippi to Alabama; and the same nationwide, according to Paul Craig Roberts, a former editor of the Wall Street Journal and former assistant secretary to the treasury under Ronald Reagan, who wrote recently: “Police in the US now rival criminals, and exceed terrorists as the greatest threat to the American public.”

The source of a great many of America’s problems are that we’re an empire.

Defense is the third-largest expenditure in the federal budget, at $689 billion, or 20% of spending. That’s after Medicaid, at $893 billion, and only slightly behind Social Security, at $701 billion, or 20%. Imagine if we reduced that spending by well more than half. That’s more than five times the $61 billion the Republicans sought to cut from the US budget this year.

What if the federal government just woke up tomorrow and said: We’re pulling troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. They’ll be home in two weeks. We’re pulling troops out of every country in the world. We’re committed to having a strong national defense — any nation that attacks our soil, citizens, or property will be met by swift and terrible retribution. But the only circumstances under which we’ll attack anyone else is if they attack us first.

It would be a costly decision, certainly. Taiwan might well fall to China, and Israel might fall to its enemies. That would be a terrible price to pay.

The Middle East would be plunged into chaos. But isn’t it already plunged into chaos? Brutal dictators might take hold of Iraq and Libya and other disputed countries; but is that any worse than now, when warlords fight to become those dictators, civilians are caught in the crossfire, and Americans are often the ones doing the shooting?

We wouldn’t lose access to Middle East oil. They have to sell it. They can’t eat oil.

And consider the benefits:

Most of the 1.4 million people serving in the military would be reassigned to peacetime duty, building roads and bridges and repairing the nation’s infrastructure as they prepare to transition into the private workforce. All that intelligence, discipline, and work ethic would be a stimulus to the economy; right now we have a creativity shortage as our best minds are spending their time shooting at each other and being shot at rather than building things. The size of our military is second only to China, but the total number of troops per capita is much higher; 7.9 per 1,000 population in the US, compared with 3.4 in China.

The military is America’s social welfare program, providing wages and benefits to a good portion of the population. It has been that way since World War II. If we’re going to have a national social welfare program, let’s have one that’s purpose built, and maybe put the participants to work building things rather than destroying.

And of course there are the physical and emotional costs of war. Total dead and wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq are 41,000, and each of those have families and friends and families that feel their pain.

And that’s only the official casualty toll. “You know, you don’t come back from combat without some type of wound, whether it be physical or mental,” says Michael Jernigan, a retired Marine corporal who gave both eyes to the war on terror.

Consider the example of the Byzantine Empire. They had a small but deadly military, capable of delivering decisive defeats against any enemy. But mostly they didn’t use that military; they played their enemies off against each other. The Byzantines lasted 1,100 years. At the rate we’re going, America isn’t going to make it to 250.

America needs to beat its swords into plowshares. Also, factories and laptop computers. We need to focus all our attention on leading the world in commerce and science and art, and quit trying to be the leaders in blowing things up.