Freeloading surfer faces trespass charge

PALMER — A Palmer man chased twice from the library’s parking lot last year is again on the wrong end of the law after Palmer police say they found him trespassing in the parking lot of Alaska USA Federal Credit Union’s Palmer branch.

Brian Tanner, 22, was arrested for trespassing Sunday. By Monday he’d been released on bail.

“We’ve had numerous contacts with him at other businesses using their wireless Internet, and he’s been told by all these businesses that unless he’s doing business with them they don’t want him on their property,” Palmer Police Department Lt. Tom Remaley said.

Remaley cited the Matanuska Valley Federal Credit Union and Palmer library as examples of places where Tanner has been warned not to park after hours. Remaley said police don’t have any indication Tanner is doing anything with the wireless accounts besides playing an online video game.

In the case of the library, Remaley said Tanner was warned once not to park there and use its network.

After their second contact with Tanner, police considered filing theft charges but dropped the matter after they were told the library doesn’t charge for Internet and had accidentally left the network on after closing.

In the Alaska USA case, Remaley said the bank had asked him to leave the parking lot and officers had warned him. After that first contact, Tanner cleared out of the parking lot. But on Sunday officers spotted him there again and decided it was time to take action. They filed the trespassing charges, and Tanner was booked into the Mat-Su Pre-Trial Facility with bail set at $250.

Nancy Usera, senior vice president for corporate development at Alaska USA, said the Palmer branch does not have a wireless network and that Tanner apparently found the parking lot to be a spot where he could access some other network.

“We called the police and we said, ‘We’ve got someone who’s loitering on our property,’” Usera said. “As far as we’re concerned, the problem has been taken care of.”

The bank has only one wireless hot spot, at its corporate offices in Anchorage, she said. And that network is used only for employees to access e-mail on lunch breaks. There is no wireless access to account information, she said.

The practice of seeking out unsecured wireless networks goes by the name “wardriving.” Internet resources abound for would-be wardrivers. The Internet also is filled with stories of folks prosecuted for hopping on networks in Florida and Michigan.

Palmer District Attorney Roman Kalytiak said that the only statute he knows of in Alaska dealing with unauthorized computer access is a criminal mischief statute — the types of laws generally reserved for vandalism.

The statute applies to “a person who gains unauthorized access to a computer but does not actually use the computer for personal purposes or take or damage information stored in the computer,” Kalytiak said, reading from a book of Alaska laws.

But the problem is that the law seems to only apply to networks that are secure — password protected or otherwise walled off from the general public, he said. It was intended to prevent people from cracking passwords or otherwise hacking into secured computers.

“I think that’s the problem we had with the Palmer thing before in that the system was available for people to use,” Kalytiak said.

Most networks established in people’s homes or at small businesses have the option of turning on such protections, but it is up to the owner to flip that switch.

“My experience is that if you wardrive you can certainly pick up the home router that’s unsecured. That’s a reality. Not everyone has put a password on their systems,” said Mike Chmielewski with Radio Free Palmer, the community Internet radio station that has established a free wireless network in downtown Palmer.

If Tanner was sitting up at the bank he likely wasn’t using Radio Free Palmer’s network. The signal isn’t strong enough, Chmielewski said.

“You wouldn’t be able to get it even over to Palmer City Hall,” he said.

The intent of establishing the free network downtown is to give people a convenient way to quickly log on for low-key things like checking e-mail and maybe surfing a few Web pages, not downloading music or videos, an activity that requires a great deal of bandwidth, Chmielewski said.

“It’s intended also to be low-level enough so that people then move onto the better service at home,” Chimelewski said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.