Crispin Cowan wrote: > Warren Harrison wrote: > >>> Ignorance of the law is different from ignorance of the facts. >>> Trespass is not trespass unless "no trespassing" signs are clearly >>> posted, because one can be fully aware of the laws of trespassing, >>> but have no chance of detecting passage from state land to private >>> property while wandering through the woods, unless signs are posted. >> >> >> Actually, this isn't true - see ORS 164.205 and below. >> While most of the time, you won't get arrested for >> trespass if you stumble onto someone's property, you >> are indeed trespassing unless you have their permission. > > > Interesting. So if there is no visible signage to indicate the boundary > of the private property, how am I supposed to know I am trespassing? In your example, a "reasonable person" would not know if there was no break in features, so you wouldn't be trespassing. So your statement "ignorance of the facts" is indeed correct. However, let's say you walk out of the forest into a obviously mowed and maintained meadow. A reasonable person might very well infer they are now on private property whether there is a sign or not. My point was that it is in general not up to the property owner to take some action to make it trespassing. > >> Most home wireless users are clueless that their >> wireless access is accessible by anyone within >> their home. In spite of a relatively small community >> that not only knows it is available, but are willing >> to share their own bandwidth, I would doubt that >> a "reasonable person" would think that random wireless >> networks are premises open to the public. > > > And that is the point of contention, because I do think that a > "reasonable person" would assume that an unprotected WAP means > "permission to surf the Internet." I have watched business people do > exactly that; they pop open the laptop, let the machine promiscuously > connect, and have at it. That is an interesting idea. *If* anyone ever tried to prosecute a war driver for trespassing (I don't want to be the first deputy to arrest someone for "cybertrespassing), it would ultimately be tested by how reasonable it sounds to the 12 people in the jury box. It would also be interesting to know the state of mind of these businesspeople you mention. Do they know they are trespassing, but still do it? Lots of people cut through someone's yard or field to take a shortcut or use a public park after hours. They know they are not supposed to, but they do so anyway. The law is really as much about state of mind as actions. This is actually more interesting than it sounds (well, maybe it does sound interesting :-) Burglary is basically defined (in Oregon) as committing a crime while trespassing. So *if* war driving *was* trespassing, and the intruder committed a computer crime, they would also be committing burglary. An ambitious DA could really stack the charges :-) > > Crispin > > -- ====================================================================== Warren Harrison, EIC/IEEE Software Magazine warren@private Department of Computer Science http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~warren Portland State University PHONE: 503-725-3108 Portland, OR 97207-0751 FAX: 503-725-3211
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