By: Chris Eckert

Over the past two semesters in PantherVision, I’ve gotten an opportunity to report on many fascinating stories, each of which holds a special place in my heart. As a producer, I enjoyed being able to help out other reporters with their stories and making them memorable.

But I wasn’t done reporting yet. I knew in my heart that I had one more story left to report. It had to be a story that was hard hitting with plenty of shock and awe. I was inspired by a mixture of the current reporting class (who all put in hard work and turned out great stories week after week), the things I learned at my internship at WITI Fox 6, and my trip to the Radio and Television News Directors Association trip in Las Vegas to do one more story.

Two old friends of mine, Andrew and Chad, lived off-campus in a duplex. When they lived there in 2006, their upstairs neighbors had wireless internet, but it wasn’t secured with a password. What that basically meant was that anyone that was in a short enough range to get the signal could log on for free. Andrew and Chad were close enough and did so for most of their lease. When the upstairs neighbors found out about it (one of them mentioned it on accident), they made Andrew and Chad help pay the bill per month.

Once I was a power producer, I had the technology beat for PantherVision. I was reading a bunch of stories on wireless Internet and stories that “danced around the issue” of protection and the legal aspects of it. To me, it seemed, many professional journalists were afraid to tackle this issue, or that people just really didn’t know about this problem.

I asked some friends what they thought before I went forward with this, and to my surprise, a lot of people tap into other people’s unsecured wireless Internet connection (usually neighbors of theirs). One person said that she had 13 people logging on to her Internet connection at once. So now I’m thinking “there’s got to be a story here.”

I talked with my professor and mentor Maryann Lazarski about the story since it involved many legal issues. We had to make sure that when I pursued this story that I wouldn’t get in any sort of legal trouble. Wisconsin State Statute 943.45 says “rearranging, tampering with or making connection with any facilities or equipment” is illegal, but was that too vague? I wanted to find out.

I knew I needed powerful video if this story was going to be any good. After all, a story about wireless Internet isn’t a visual story in the least bit. With the help of fellow producer Brandon Krause, we went onto Downer Avenue with my laptop and were able to pull up a list of unsecured wireless Internet connections. We then went door to door and found Mike Morford and George Chironis. They live together in a duplex and share unsecured wireless Internet.

The big issue with stealing wireless Internet is that hackers can tap into your personal information. UWM sites like PantherMail and PAWS are secure from hackers because they are encrypted, meaning no one can hack into the server and steal information. But if you use the same password and username on unencrypted sites such as MySpace and Facebook, they can steal that information. The possibility of swiping your credit card information is out there too if you use that on unencrypted sites. That’s the big thing that people are unaware of, and that’s what I based my story around.

After that, I talked to Information & Media Technologies people at UWM about ways to protect you from identity theft, and then I talked to Maryann about what to do next. She saw the BIG picture and told me to contact Wisconsin State Legislators to see if the law on wireless Internet should be changed. We invited State Legislator Jeff Plale in to find out if the law was too vague.

Senator Plale was nice enough to stop in and watch my story. He felt that there are things that should be changed and that the law needs to be tightened up. The reason that laws really haven’t kept up with the times is that “the law always moves slower than technology” according to Plale.

Immediately after talking to me. Plale put Legislative Council Attorney’s right to work looking into ways to tighten the law. Only time will tell what will become of this.