When 17-year-old Garyl Tan Jia Luo piggybacked on his neighbour’s unsecured wireless Internet network to chat online, he could not have imagined that in doing so he would make Asian legal history.

Information technology (IT) experts and lawyers say Tan was the first in Singapore, and possibly Asia, to be sentenced in court for “wireless mooching,” or piggybacking on an unsecured wireless network to surf the Internet. A judge in the city-state’s district court sentenced him to 18 months’ probation in January. Tech-savvy Singapore, one of Asia’s most wired nations, appears to be the regional pioneer in clamping down on wireless network freeloaders, IT experts and lawyers said. They said they were not aware of similar prosecutions in the Asia-Pacific region, and that only a handful of cases had emerged over the past three years in North America.

“There is no similar criminal case in Hong Kong. And we believe Singapore is quite a pioneer in this area,” said Howard Lau, president of Hong Kong’s Professional Information Security Association, an industry grouping.

The Singapore case may set a precedent in Asia and “open the floodgates for similar prosecutions,” said Aloysious Cheang, president of the Special Interest Group in Security and Information Integrity, a Singapore information and communications security association. Moochers make up an estimated five to 10 percent of the region’s wireless traffic at any time, said Bernie Trudel, principal security consultant at network firm Cisco Systems Asia Pacific, which supplies networking equipment through its Linksys division. Residential wireless networks are more vulnerable to piggybackers than corporate networks because only about 40 to 50 percent of home networks are secured, compared with 80 to 90 percent for corporate users, Trudel said. Bryan Tan, a lawyer specialising in IT law at Keystone Law Corporation in Singapore, said one of the few cases similar to Garyl Tan’s occurred in Florida.

According to a report in the St Petersburg Times newspaper, a 41-year-old man was charged in April 2005 with unauthorised access of a computer network. He was arrested for accessing the Internet using a homeowner’s wireless network on a laptop while parked outside. In Singapore, Garyl Tan was charged under Singapore’s Computer Misuse Act for securing access without authority to a computer for the purpose of obtaining computer services. Tan got probation, but conviction could have brought him up to three years’ imprisonment, a 10,000 dollar (C$6,490) fine, or both.

Although wireless mooching is not unusual across Asia, prosecutions are uncommon for several reasons, said lawyers who specialise in information technology law. They cited the low priority placed on mooching offences, the difficulty in tracking offenders and an absence of laws against piggybacking.

“I would not say that the act of piggybacking is unusual. It is the prosecution of it that is unusual ... taking action against an individual who is piggybacking without the intention to cause any harm is not a pressing criminal matter for most countries,” said Cyril Chua, partner at law firm Alban Tay Mahtani and de Silva in Singapore. Countries may place a lower priority on wireless mooching than on hacking and more severe technology-related crimes, Chua added. Unlike Singapore, some may not even have clear laws prohibiting wireless piggybacking, he said.

“While there are laws in Hong Kong and South Korea relating to unauthorised access to computer systems like hacking, I couldn’t find any laws prohibiting Wi-Fi piggybacking,” he said. “There are millions of Wi-Fi networks around the world and it is only a matter of time and evidence before more cases surface,” Tan said.

Under Hong Kong’s Telecommunications Ordinance, any person who knowingly causes a computer to obtain unauthorised access to any programme or data held in a computer, is liable on conviction to a fine of 20,000 Hong Kong dollars (C$2,560). “The case heightens awareness about wireless security,” he said. None of that was on Garyl Tan’s mind when he sat on the kerb outside his home at about 2:00 am on May 13 last year.

Garyl Tan’s case has emphasised the need for tighter wireless network security, said Daniel Seng, a lecturer specialising in IT law at the National University of Singapore.