It did for one man in Buffalo, New York. At 6:20 a.m. on March 7, he and his wife woke up to the sound of someone breaking down their back door. It was seven armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has a division focused on child pornography investigations.

The ICE agents were screaming at him to get down on the ground even as he was shouting for them to say who they were. As he lay on his living room floor with assault weapons trained on him, the agents were calling him a pedophile and a pornographer.

"You're a creep ... just admit it," one of the agents accused. "We know who you are! You downloaded thousands of images at 11:30 last night," recounted the man's lawyer.

Of course, the Buffalo man hadn't downloaded any child pornography at all. In fact, he had bought a new wireless Internet router not long before, and he had gotten fed up with the complicated process of setting up a password to protect it.

On February 11, an investigator with the Department of Homeland Security had connected with an Internet user who was sharing child pornography. The agent identified the user's router's IP address -- which belonged to the man from Buffalo. But further investigation turned up evidence that the actual person the agent had discovered was a neighbor who had been connecting to the Internet through the Buffalo man's unsecured wireless router.

The neighbor was arrested on March 17 and has pled not guilty to the federal sex offense. The Buffalo man later got an apology from ICE and the U.S. Attorney.

Theft of Internet access is common, but it is unknown how often unsecured routers are pirated to distribute child pornography

No one knows how often unsecured Internet routers are used to commit crimes like distributing child porn, identity theft or illegal downloading. It's not even clear that piggybacking on someone else's Internet access is a crime.

A poll conducted for the industry group the Wi-Fi alliance found that 32 percent of Americans 18 and older had at least tried to access a private Wi-Fi network that wasn't theirs. Many people intentionally leave their networks password free as a courtesy -- and even if you don't do it intentionally, many people consider leaving it unsecured an implicit invitation.

You might not even realize someone else is using your signal, which usually reaches 300-400 feet from the router, although a slower connection is a clue.

Guilty or not, "you look like a suspect," says George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr.

Wireless routers come with encryption software, but setting it up can require consulting the owner's manual. The federal Computer Emergency Readiness Team recommends making your network invisible by disabling the router's identifier broadcasting function. Additionally, replace the default network name and password, which are widely known. And, be vigilant about security updates.

Source: The Patriot-News, "Unsecured Wi-Fi can lure criminals, cause trouble for Internet subscribers," April 25, 2011