Interesting. It does sound like there was a pretty fair amount of other evidence that led to the belief that that man was indeed the one who accessed the porn, and not like he was just an innocent Joe cooking an omelet, unaware that someone was lurking with a laptop outside the bathroom window. It sounds like he actually was committing the crime, but tried to create reasonable doubt by asserting that the downloading could've been done by someone else. While it could've, the fact that there were CD's with downloaded porn on them found within his things in the residence was supporting evidence, and they weren't convinced he was the innocent victim of bandwidth theft via wireless connection.

I guess it's a matter of weighing things. There are open wireless signals all over town. Residences. Coffee shops. McD's. I could sit in the parking lot of any of the fourteen hotels in my town and be online within seconds. Two churches have it. All of the public school facilities in our location have open wireless. The college down the road has it.

While I know it's possible for someone to use our signal for illegal reasons, I just think it's highly unlikely. There are much stronger signals that have a much higher level of public usage, which I believe would make any individual tapping the network harder to tap or even notice.

But... if I did have a secure connection, would that keep my laptop from "seeing" those unsecured signals, and keep me linked to my own router even if I went to the far end of the house, where the neighbor's signal is stouter than my own?