Friday, January 20, 2012

Woman wants jail time for bigoted WIFI router name

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WIFI sign

It’s hard to figure out who to root for in this story, the bigoted asshole or the overreacting idiot:

A bigot named their WiFi signal “F--- All Jews and N----” — and now cops are investigating.

The hateful signal I.D. popped up on the iPhone of a 28-year-old mom inside a Teaneck, N.J. recreation center, where her 3-year-old daughter was attending dance class.

The offending signal was coming from a router connected in the Richard Rodda Community Center in the the township, located 10 miles outside New York City.

"When I first saw it, I said, 'Did that say what I thought it said?," said the woman, who asked that her name not be used.

“I was shocked, hurt. I felt harassed."

The signal showed on her phone as it searched for an Internet connection in the center Tuesday.

"I felt like I'm bringing my daughter to this place, and it should be a safe place," she said.

The woman, who is African-American, rushed to the office, and informed employees and other parents of the hateful WiFi connection.

The police are now investigating this “possible bias crime” and the woman is pushing for the router’s owner to be thrown in jail for it.

To be clear, it’s not certain whether the offending router is public or private, and I would assume that anyone who offers a public WIFI service is presumably susceptible to anti-discrimination laws that bar them from naming said router in a way that pisses off half the population. But then, I would also assume that anyone who offers a public WIFI service would rather know this, which makes it that much more likely that this is the private router from one lone bigot somewhere in the vicinity of the recreation center.

At any rate, here’s what it is: On the one hand, whoever named that router is a bigoted twerp and probably doesn’t have the maturity to enroll in junior high. On the other, being a bigoted, immature twerp does not make one a criminal, and naming their (presumably) private router in any way that anyone might find offensive for any reason is not breaking the law, much less grounds for throwing them behind bars.

I once more find myself dreaming of the day where birth licenses become mandatory.