Geeklawyer uses wi-fi quite a lot. He has it wired into his own home but because it allows con­nec­tion to the Inter­net on his bill he has it locked down. Noth­ing would be worse than hav­ing some­one come along and use it to swap kiddy porn or engage in spam­ming. But not every­one does the same. Some peo­ple make a con­scious deci­sion to allow oth­ers to access their net­work and oth­ers find it eas­ier to use a low secu­rity net­work that is easy to con­nect to with no pass­word. Geeklawyer does this at one of his addresses which is sub­ur­ban and not highly likely to be abused. At his pri­mary house he does and the pass­word is long and con­fus­ing so it would be tempt­ing for the less geeky to cheat by set­ting no pass­word as option for access.

It was with inter­est there­fore that he saw the news that an indi­vid­ual arrested for access­ing some­ones unse­cured wi-fi net­work. A man was seen in the early hours lin­ger­ing in a car with the win­dows blocked out with card­board to dis­guise the glow of his lap­top screen. He was unsuc­cess­ful and neigh­bours called the police who arrested him. was offered and accepted a cau­tion for “dis­hon­estly obtain­ing elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices with intent to avoid payment.”

The prob­lem is that there is no such offence. What seems to have hap­pened is that the police felt he was ‘up to no good’ and flailed around for any likely offence to accuse him of. And they lit upon the anal­o­gous crime of abstract­ing elec­tric­ity with the inten­tion of avoid­ing pay­ment. How­ever this is a spe­cific statu­to­rily defined offence cre­ated for the very par­tic­u­lar rea­son that no prior statute nor Com­mon Law was able to deal with the issue ‘theft’ of elec­tric­ity. This alone would sug­gest that the sug­gested offence was bogus.
It may be that they though that there was a gen­eral accu­sa­tion of theft and dis­hon­esty, in the Ghosh sense, which was appro­pri­ate. In any event they didn’t cau­tion him for this but had they done so Geeklawyer sug­gests that it would have failed. The use of an inse­cure net­work can­not prop­erly be said to be dis­hon­est when there are so many very good, objec­tive, rea­sons to sup­pose that an open access net­work was delib­er­ately made so or at least adverted to and accepted by the net­work owner.

Geeklawyer would have advised D to reject the cau­tion and to ‘offer the police out’ and see if they were pre­pared to back-up their opin­ions. If D was lucky Ruthie would have been pros­e­cut­ing him and Geeklawyer, in an novel step into infra dig areas of prac­tice, defend­ing him.

Update:
:oops: memo to self: “Stop talk­ing about crim­i­nal law”. Stop or do research first. Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Act 2003 sec­tion 125(1). Mind you on the facts Geeklawyer remains of the view no offence was com­mit­ted and the thrust of the post was right that that there was no dis­hon­esty enabling a conviction.