Who Are the Brain Police?

[With apologies to the late Mr. Zappa]

Who are they? Well, to hear some folks over at Slashdot talk, you'd think that they were the managers of the posh Canoa Ranch Resort condominium/hotel in Tucson. It seems that, along with all the other upscale amenities (salon and spa, resort pool, fitness center and “Village Center” - does No. 6 know about this?) the owners are going to provide you with wireless Internet access as well.

Oh, yeah: they're also going to require you to encrypt access to that wireless access point (WAP).

Well, once the Slashdotters got on to that one, you'd think that Jackooted Thugs were just around the corner. As Paul McNamara relates in his July 24th Buzzblog at Network World, “Silly was the least of the insults tossed at this idea.” The technorati were in High Dudgeon (just down the road from Low Dudgeon) and waxed wroth.

Then Roth waxed them for a while, but that's a topic for another blog - probably the one where I defend stealing jokes from Julius Marx.

Anyway, when asked why all the fuss, Sales Manager Bryan Welch said “We just don't want to see anybody hurt with their wireless system. If someone (unauthorized) were accessing it and an owner's information, there could be damage and a potential lawsuit.”

To which The Technology Curmudgeon can only add: “Well, DUH!”

Despite the fact that one Slashdot poster (as quoted by McNamara) took the position that the decision to provide encryption on your WAP was no different from the decision on whether or not to lock your door, the stakes here are clearly higher. Failure to secure your home can result in loss and misery for you and your family, but that's about as far as it's going to go.

Failure to secure your WAP, on the other hand, is more like driving under the influence in that you create a public nuisance, if not an outright menace. An unsecured WAP is an invitation for war drivers to use that access point for a variety of nefarious purposes, including the dissemenation of spam, worms and viruses - all of which cause damage to the community as a whole.

Cruising the Information Superhighway unsecured, in short, is not that different from cruising the Interstate with a fifth of Jack Daniels in your bloodstream.

So, while nobody is seriously suggesting (yet) that There Oughta Be a Law, I don't think you can say of wireless security (to quote “Fats” Waller in a totally different context) “'tain't nobody's business if I do”.