Simply put, Maus Magill, you are wrong. US Code, Title 18, section 2511:
Subsection 4 provides for fines or imprisonment for up to 5 years.
Subsection 5, Merijeek, allows the provider of broadcasts like XM to sue in Federal Court. You can listen to your neighbor’s boom box, but you’d better not try to hack together your own to avoid paying XM.
Back in the bad old days, a short wave radio was often used to listen to ship-to-shore phone calls, but only on one side of the conversation. Two such radios would permit listening to both sides. Since shrimpers in those days went out for extended periods, some of the calls one could blunder across were often pretty explicit as to what one party would like to do to another party. Nothing illegal about listening to short wave radio, lots of people used to do it as a hobby.
@Paperback Using some walkie talkies, police scanners, or even old cordless phones you could intercept cordless phone conversations fairly easily, sometimes even when you didn’t want to, so the intentionality would be difficult to prove in court.
I certainly think it would give one reasonable doubt and certainly a strong case on appeal if you were convicted.
Interesting cite paperbackwriter.
Maus, are you thinking of a December 1996 Florida case where a Newt Gingrinch phone call was secretly recorded by a couple operating a scanner? According to an expert on the PBS News Hour, it was illegal.
Ooh, good one!
Perhaps a better analogy along the stereo vein would be if you were using a remote control to manipulate your neighbors big-screen TV so that you could watch it through a window from you own home. The point is that when using WiFi, you are not just passively intercepting signals that are passing through your property. You are also transmitting signals to your neighbor’s hardware, actively manipulating someone else’s property for your own ends.
Of course, unlike the TV example, you are not completely hijacking their hardware in such a way that they cannot also use it. But you are forcing them to share a limited resource even though they don’t share ownership.
It may be “theft of services” and depending on just how your state’s computer trespass laws are written, it might be that too.
As far as FCC regulation of the airwaves goes, it is legal to receive any signal you can pick up (except a cell phone signal) but it not legal to transmit anything you want. Your use of their wireless is probably curtailable interference, but since wireless runs in a category of equipment (the so-called Part 15) for which no individual transmitter licensing is required, it’s very unlikely that someone is going to get an FCC cease and desist order on that basis (or even if the FCC would bother to issue one).
Has anyone ever been prosecuted for hijacking their neighbor’s cordless phone? If so, the same laws might apply. Or they might not; phones are special.
In any case, it is important to note that the lack of adequate access controls does not equate to permission. The mere fact that your neighbor left their car parked in their driveway with the engine running is not license for you to hop in and drive it to the store. The legal test is permission, not capability. If only impossible things were illegal, there would be no need for police.
As a slight hijack, I setup a 128bit WEP key on my wireless router and my laptop. Does this mean that my network is inaccessable (meaning they need to send data encrypted under my unknown-to-them key to get it to work), or merely that data transferred between the router and my laptop is inaccessable?
The former. No one can use the network without having the key. But note that WEP is very weak encryption, so it’s not all that hard for someone to find the key if they’re persistent. You should be using WPA.
Practically, neither. WEP can be cracked in 20 minutes (less under most conditions).
Thanks for the advice; I have switched to WPA. I feel safer already!
I think this is more like having a drive in movie in the lot behind your house. Is it illegal to look out your kitchen window and watch the movie?
I get your point, but I think there’s an issue of choosing to engage. You have to select the specific WiFi network to access it - you know what you’re doing and choose to. It’d be hard to ignore a drive-in next door. That’s what I was going for in the movie example - that you could just be walking down a street (searching for all networks), pass a theater with its exit door ajar (find an unprotected network), and choose to go in (log onto said network).
Nope, not at all. You are obtaining access to a computer network. You have taken intentional, deliberate steps to enter their domain, their system (both the neighbor’s laptop and the ISP’s network). You are sending out signals to hijack some-one else’s service.
The drive-in movie and overheard radio analogies fail because the “service provider” is sending out the signal and you are passively receiving it. Piggybacking on an unprotected WiFi port is not passive reception.
Bricker, Una, and I have posted cites to multiple laws that could be used to bring charges against this. Oh, wait, here’s a cite where the Feds actually did charge for unauthorized access through a wireless network.
This ie exactly what the earlier posters were doing (or contemplating). So, yes, it is illegal, not just immoral or unethical.
Let me try to explain how data transmission works, so that you all can see how using someone else’s WiFi is in fact stealing. Imagine a freeway with traffic. Each car or truck represents a packet of data. The amount of data that passes through a given point each second is nominally determined by the bandwidth - how many lanes are open on the freeway. Ultimately, any Internet traffic has to pass through the freeway at some point. Users with broadband access have several lanes of on and off ramps to the freeway, while WiFi users also have a bunch of city streets leading up to the ramps. With encryption, a WiFi network has security guards at all the intersections that lead into these streets and ultimately to the ramps. With no encryption, the streets still belong to that network but they are unguarded and open. If you use someone else’s WiFi, you are tying up some of those streets, and ultimately space on the ramps leading to the freeway - you are stealing some of their bandwidth.
It is both ethical and contains amusing hacking.
Story: a friend of ours comes over with his laptop to use our firewalled Wireless Access Point. He detects a neighbor’s WAP which is unprotected. He can even get into their computer and get all sorts of information (turns out to be mostly boring term papers). Friend does the following:
Uses the neighbor’s WAP to make their printer spit out a how-to page on securing a home WAP.
A few hours after a shriek from next door, neighbor’s WAP reappears secure.
My head is woosy from the rush of having an answer to satisfy everyone. 
Fair enough.
I do want to point out, while I did not think it was illegal, I did not advocate using your neighbor’s wireless access.
neuroman, that is the case I was (totally mis)remembering. I’m pleading insanity, I was married to my first wife at the time.
You’ve got me. I can’t cite any law or stature.
But…
I work on a large university campus and I am in and out of wireless network range all day, so my PC is set up to take advantage of the fastest available connection, WiFi if I’m near a hotspot or the modem if not.
Often, I also work from home. I live in campus housing, so from some parts of my house, I can access the campus wireless network, which I am absolutely entitled to use. However, when I sit on my living room sofa, I connect with my neighbor’s network instead.
Because I am located in my own property and because I have a legitimate reason for being set up to use the fastest available network connection, I really don’t feel like there’s a positive obligation on me to reconfigure my network settings every time I enter the south end of my living room simply because my next-door-neighbor’s wireless network is unprotected.
Also, I’m an amoral cheapskate who likes free, speedy internet access from my sof-- er, never mind that part…
But YOU enabled your computer to seek out and connect to available networks. I don’t see the difference between clicking some “connect to strongest available network” checkbox in your driver setup, and hacking weak WEP passwords - they’re just putting different levels of effort into theft.
It seems like people have been focusing on whether using WiFi signals from one’s neighbor is a crime perpetrated on the neighbor. However, I fail to see how it is NOT a crime against the ISP. The ISP is supplying its services to the neighbor under an agreement only with that person, its customer. By using the WiFI connection, the WiFi sniffer is using the services of the ISP without consent. I see that no differently than tapping into a neighbor’s physical DSL line, from the ISP’s point of view. That is most certainly wrong.