Belgian Wireless drifter arrested

We have seen cases in the UK and the Netherlands were people, surfing on an access point of another, were arrested. Now it's our turn.

In the Belgian East-Flemish city Sint-Gillis-Waas, a 22 year old man was arrested because he was surfing on the wireless access point from a local resident.
The young men from Sint-Gillis-Waas was parked in his car in front of the house in the Margriet street of the resident. The local police arrested the suspect and after registration of the facts, let him go.

It is not known if the wireless access of the resident was secured or not. Nevertheless, the young men must justify himself before a judge on the account of hacking. Gaining unuathorized access to a computernetwork in any situation is still a breach of IT Law.

Connecting by accident onto your neighbours AP is one thing, sitting in your car in front of a house is another. Even if there was no malicious intent, it's just not allowed. So be carefull what you do with your laptop or PDA.

You could discuss the morality of the whole thing but that has been done before:

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/schneier_asks_t.html
or

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wireles_1.html

There was also some ongoing local discussion:

The Radio 1 program Peeters & Pichal had a lot of attention on the topic of wireless networks (wardrivers.be).

On the site of Tik vzw (belgian consumergroup) there is also an ongoing discussion.

Bonus: Old documentary clip from Terzake (Belgian TV)

UPDATE: By the way, the picture above is not from this story and just some funny picture I found. But the story is real.

Het Nieuwsblad
Het belang van Limburg
De Standaard
Tweakers.net