WASILLA -- When police in Palmer confiscated Brian Tanner's laptop and ran him off the Palmer Library parking lot last week, he turned to the one place where he could count on free, reliable Internet access.
The Palmer Public Library.
He shares a home computer with his parents, but when he needs lots of time online these days, he often checks his e-mail and surfs the Web on public computers at the library.
"I couldn't log on this weekend because they're closed," Tanner said Tuesday.
Police first found Tanner, 21, of Palmer parked Feb. 17 in the library parking lot, surfing the Web after hours, and asked him to leave. The next day, police spotted him there again after hours and this time warned him he could be charged with theft of services. The officer confiscated Tanner's computer and chased him off again.
Palmer Police Lt. Tom Remaley said officers are waiting on a search warrant based on the suspicion that Tanner committed theft.
"There may be things on this computer that prove or disprove the crime, but in order for us to look at them you either need to get consent or you need to get a search warrant," Remaley said.
He said Tanner could be charged, at minimum, with criminal mischief for defying a police order to refrain from Web surfing in the library parking lot.
An expert on Internet law, Jennifer Granick of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School in California, said she feared police may be on a fishing expedition.
They may "use something that's not really illegal as a stalking horse to go looking for something else illegal," Granick said Thursday by phone.
What little case law there is holds that hopping on unsecured wireless networks is not a crime, she said.
Granick said the Internet center could help Tanner should he face criminal charges.
Palmer library director Pat Kilmain said Tanner broke no library rules that night. During the day, anyone in the library can use the wireless service for free. At night, the wireless signal is usually turned off.
However, Tanner happened across the wireless signal during a few days when it was left on for maintenance purposes. Since then, it's been turned off at night.
"We haven't seen fit to need rules since we don't ordinarily have it turned on," Kilmain said.
Still, "it's a city ordinance that you're not supposed to be in the parking lot after hours," Kilmain said. Although, she added, that law is not strictly enforced.
Kilmain said that she generally leaves daytime patrons with laptops alone. Her one concern is that someone might download a huge file and eat up the library bandwidth.
"We do try to keep an eye on it," she said. "The overage charges are quite high."
Jackie Kenshalo, spokeswoman for Matanuska Telephone Association, the library's Internet provider, said bandwidth limits are very high and overages are rare.
Tanner said in a previous interview that he was playing games at conquerclub.com, where he is a moderator for a game similar to the board game Risk.
The initial report of his run-in with the law made the rounds of cyberspace, appearing on a number of popular blogs and on news sites including fark.com and engadget.com.
"It's interesting to see what people said. I didn't think it was going to be such a big deal," Tanner said.
Tanner, whose parents won't let him log on after 9 p.m., said he often goes trolling for open networks. He said Alaska state troopers have chased him from Palmer neighborhoods after residents spotted him outside their homes with his laptop logging onto their networks.
Troopers told him to park in a public place, Tanner said.
Kenshalo said she has heard of complaints from customers regarding people hopping onto their networks.
Seth Scavette, MTA information security officer, said wireless users should be worried about others using their unsecured networks. If an intruder does something illegal while online, that can come back to the person paying for the Internet service.
More than that, though, a network computer often has the ability to download or upload files to and from other computers on the network. Users logged on to an unsecured network could steal personal information or upload malicious software, Scavette said.
And it wouldn't be hard. A Google search, he said, turns up tools that scan networked hard drives and report back what's protected and what's not.
Scavette said he's never heard an MTA customer complain that someone hopped on an unsecured network and damaged his or her computer. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
With malicious software, "it's hard to prove where it came from. It can come from a lot of different sources," Scavette said.
He urges anyone with wireless networks to put the security functions in place. Wireless routers can be programmed to accept only certain computers. Most routers come with encryption technology. Firewalls should be put in place and anti-virus software kept up to date.
And if a customer doesn't know what all this means, they should call their service provider's help desk. MTA, he said, is happy to help customers close security holes.
Of course, none of this is foolproof. Dedicated, sophisticated hackers can surmount most obstacles. But why bother when there are unsecured networks to go after?
"Odds are somebody is not going to try to get into your network after you've turned on some of the basic security on a router," he said.
Contact Daily News reporter Andrew Wellner at awellner@adn.com or 352-6710.
