My wife's boss, who is a police official, recently made a blanket statement which didn't sound accurate to me, but, being that he's my wife's boss and all, I didn't want to challenge in public.
The statement was in the context of discussion of public wireless in the downtown of our city, and someone brought up that that kind of public network was unencrypted, and his statement was that unencrypted wireless like that was a leading cause of identity theft.
I've tried to research this, and haven't found anything that indicates that that is anything like the case. It also goes against everything that I know, and against the KISS principle (that being, in this case, that it's often both easier and more effective to break into servers and steal large batches of data rather than trying to decode traffic and break into a session one person at a time.
So, anyone have any real data or reports one way or another? I am not looking for anecdotes, but for actual links to crime stats, surveys, etc, which can be cited.
Thanks!
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