It should generally be obvious to people that if they are leeching off someone else, be it a wireless network service or not, it is not okay. If there is a law prohibiting it that the leech doesn't know about and he gets whacked with charges, boo-hoo, screw him. He was already engaged in unethical behavior, so he does not have much of a leg to stand on. The fact that the world is full of arseholes does not change the ethics of the situation at all. That said, anyone who does not protect their own WLAN is a moron for more than one reason.
As far as it being legal to listen in on wireless and cell phone communications without permission, all I can say that US laws seem to be ridiculous. Just attempting that will result in felony charges here and the authorities WILL pursue that all the way to the end. WLANs are different, because a lot of people don't know how to protect them or even what network they connect to (I see this every day at work, that being customer tech support at an ISP), but if you report somebody using your WLAN, they get whacked.
It really does boil down to a user of technical equipment having a duty of care to know the relevant regulations and act according to them. It doesn't matter if the person is the CEO of a telecom company, a police officer or an ordinary citizen, the duty of care exists, though it is arguably more demanding in the first two cases and thus any dereliction should be judged more harshly in such cases. Personal irresponsibility is no excuse.
And, as I said previously, police corruption and things related to that, such as breaking civil liberties laws, are a completely different topic. The way the police department setup, their funding and the "justice" system work in the US is frankly worthless. To describe my own opinion of it, the term "utter contempt" is being charitable.
But in this case, there isn't much gray area surrounding the issue.
- a) Cafe owner sets up WLAN intended for paying customers only
- b) There is a law against unauthorized network access
- c) Man uses the WLAN without paying the cafe owner
- d) a+b+c = illegal action on the man's part
- e) The neighboring barber shop has had a problem with one of their employees being stalked
- f) The man's actions from c) appear to be the activities of possible stalker
- g) e+f = reasonable cause of suspicion, which leads them to report the man to the police
- h) Cops investigate the situation, with reasonable cause and determine that there is no stalking but suspect some law is being broken nonetheless (not actually an unreasonable assumption)
- i) Cops check laws, refer to prosecutor for advice
- j) Man gets charged with the felony
That's the way this case happened, and I really cannot find any fault in the actions of the police. Some perhaps on the part of the prosecutor, but hat depends on how much leeway if any he had, which is not apparent from the article. If police, during the investigation of a possible crime, find evidence of an unrelated crime having been committed, they are not free to ignore that. If they do, they could end up being charged with crimes themselves.
The facts of this particular case are fairly crystal clear if the article is correct and reliable. Other cases where police corruption and lawbreaking play a part are not relevant to this thread. They deserve their own separate topics.