From what I understood, if the wireless was unsecured the charge of accessing a secured network would not have been used and it would have changed other things in the case as well.

Hard to know for sure... But regardless you cannot threaten a public official (or any citizen for that matter), but the public official will be taken a lot more seriously. You are right, the cops appear to be trained to run prebuild applications and dont understand technology. After all, most of the cops probably had little to nothing to do with technology before they went into their profession. Unforunately for Barry, we were involved long before that...

Basically inaccurate...

The firewall log was the first thing that showed someone else was connecting at the time the emails were being sent. I was not able to account for certain MAC addresses attaching during the events. That pretty much proved that it wasn't the neighbor. From there it was a long road to catch the hacker. And you're right, ip address != person; I had to get a lot more than that to finger the hacker.

The police, FBI, and Secret service could not watch the traffic without a wiretap warrant and from what I was understanding from them a judge would not issue one. I was however allowed to watch it since I was being paid to do so. If I was not paid then that would have been another issue. In addition the police didn't know how to read PCAPs and there's a lot more to that but I'll leave that comment where it stands.

Careful assuming that WPA or WPA2 is fully secure; it's not. Granted it's not as easy to hack but it can be. The only true secure consumer level wireless is using a hardwire instead. Consumer level devices need more support for rotating keys which will help immensely with security.

You might want to look up the official definition of "hacker"... www.webster.com

The fact is if a item is secured and you gain access without permission, it is considered illegal. If you have a storage shed and take the cheap way out and use a $1.00 lock and someone cuts it off with a toe nail clipper is that breaking and entering or not considered because they didn't buy a $20 lock that was unbreakable? Can you honestly say that because a mechanism is easily circumvented that it's legal to do so? The point that Barry had to use a piece of software to circumvent the (weak) security on the wireless device is enough to consider it hacking. This would have been a completely different case if the wireless was open.

The problem with trying to go for that was a "he says, they said" argument. You have one person making the claim with the other denying it and no one else was a witness. How is that proven?

I just got forwarded this link by an associate of mine. I was surprised to find out this made slashdot... I was the "private investigator" that was hired to originally absolve the neighbor from sending the original emails which included the child porn to the lawfirm's partners. After seeing the pattern I thought I had a good chance to catch the hacker and the firm retained my services to go after him. The reasoning was that if we were to lock things down (remove the wireless and hardwire) that the person trying to get at the neighbor would find other avenues to get at him. We had a very reasonable honey pot that could produce honey sitting in front of us. I'm independent not working for any one other than my own company/myself or subcontracted for numerous firms around. I used a combination of wireshark and a few self custom written utilities to go after this guy. And no, these utilities are mine and are not for sale; sorry. I'm an engineer/analyst, security specialist, and developer with about 24 years of paid professional experience which really helps when you need to understand something then write a utility to provide it. His wireless was installed by qwest and used WEP as the base configuration (GASP). Whether or not this encryption should have been used or not, the sheer nature that there was some form of encryption did matter in the end. It is easy to hack WEP (and not too hard for WPA/WPA2 either...) but it is illegal to do so. This is one of the six charges he was charged with. From what I understand, if there was no encryption then it would have been a completely different case... It took months of watching the traffic, sifting through gigabytes of PCAP logs, to find what I was looking for. Once I found the smoking gun it was provided back to the FBI that validated what I found then issued a search warrant to go after the guy. The fact was that a MAC address was impossible to use so the firewall log only showed that rogue connections were being made. A single IP address was also impossible to use since that IP address was being assigned by the neighbor's DHCP server (dsl router). The FBI and Secret Service was not involved with the initial technical search nor could they be due to federal laws. Barry was a "certified ethical hacker" (CEH) which means that he knew the process and has been trained to run the proper utilities to hack. Not that this is mandatory, any kiddie can search on youtube to find out how to do this and just how easy it is. But he at least understood the concept of IP addressing. It turns out that he understood MAC addresses as well since he was changing his computer's NIC's MAC address on a regular basis. I don't know exactly what was found on Barry's computers once the FBI took over or how much (if any) additional child porn was pulled. I do know he found the previous neighbors (from another city) SSNs, their tax returns, and also copies of the current threatening letters on his computers. The other neighbor's around Barry's house were also broken into which made the argument of using a YAGI antennae an almost impossible feat due to the physical locations of the houses. All I know is that this guy had some serious issues and became "bitter" at the world that seemed to have started when his wife suddenly died about 10 years ago. There was a LOT to this case and it wasn't a simple slam dunk. We had a mountain of evidence that was racked up over a period of time. Each piece was necessary to prove/disprove methods and ownership. The worst part was getting the information in a form that the jury would understand. I firmly believe that our federal prosecutor had a good understanding (and took the time to understand) the technology behind it and created a very easily understood case without losing the intrigrity of the technology. Point is, no matter how good you think you are; there is always someone better (and the same goes for me as well). Stay white; its just not worth it.... This guy is looking at a possible 44 years in fed. Barry was offered a plea of 2 years in fed in turn for pleading guilty to two charges back in June which he rejected (this plea did not include the child pornography). Shortly there after he was thrown in jail for violating his conditions of release which included having a computer in his house and using a public computer at Barnes and Noble. Once a computer person commits a crime like this I doubt any reasonable company will want to hire them again in a trusted position. In other words, he's ruined his career path. p.s. This wasn't my first hacker catch, but it's the first I can sort of talk about (the others were minors). I wish I could talk about the whole thing but I have a confidentiality understanding with a few people involved with the case.