Crimes commited using public computers

Earlier today the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, SvD for short. Published an article about cyber crimes being committed using public computers at libraries and internet cafes. The police, of course, are not happy about this, most libraries in Sweden don't have user accounts but simply lend their computers to anyone. There are how ever good examples of libraries that enforce user accounts. Most crimes commited are related to personal affairs, such as slander, insults and threats. It seems that our youth has understood the importance of covering your tracks. This I consider to be a good thing, because when they grow up they will not offer access to anybody without ensuring that they will be able to trace him or her later on. In a best case scenario this will lead to all libraries having user accounts, and in a worst case scenario the libraries ending up logging everything, which is unnecessary and will only invade on the users privacy. All the necessary logs are kept (or at least should be kept) by the accessed host.

But what about all other points of access? Cafes? WiFi? Schools? Especially in the WiFi case I doubt that the police will have much to go on. We could of course charge the owner, but if a Swedish court rules in favor of full responsibility for your internet connection people will get afraid and WiFi sales plummet. Since this is not clear from a juridical point of view, this is the very reason that I will not use WiFi at home. I simply don't want anyone breaching security and possibly leaving me responsible with what ever crime they want to commit.

I am looking forward to seeing how our courts will handle this and how our laws will change.

Article number one in SvD (In Swedish)
Article number two in SvD, a response from the public library of Stockholm (In Swedish)