I wish them well in their efforts to penetrate my network undetected and install an undiscovered trojan on my machines.

WAIT!!! That would actually be a violation of their own law w/o a warrant.

They would be terrorists by their own definition.

Comments like these crack me up.  The Feds and the police are very familiar with the law, and especially in how it applies to them.  They also know how to operate in the "grey area".  It's one of the reason that any decent sized agency has a legal department, dedicated to the sole task of interperating statues and case law, and providing guidelines to operate without "breaking" these laws.

Just because a law enforcement officer/agency doesn't have a signed warrant by a magistrate, doesn't mean that they can't, or won't, wiretap/evesdrop/monitor/surveil.  It just means that any evidence they gather while conducting these activities, without a warrant, will not be admissible in court, unless it also falls under some specificly excemt circumstances (open/plain view, hot pursuit, yada, yada, yada).

Just because there is a "law", doesn't make it impossible for the act to be committed.  It only provides for fair warning, and punishment should an individual fullfill the requirements for the comission of the illegal act.

They are more than able to violate the spirit of the law, but if they never use the evidence in court, it's really up to the elected officials to stop them.

In order for the common citizen to take any action, they would have to be able to prove either some type of malfeasance or misfeasance that was perpetrated against them by the officer/agency.

But wait! The Patriot Act will allow the FBI to do [b][i]anything[/i][/b] in the name of fighting terrorism.

I have a nice honeypot attached to my network that makes for an attractive trap for ANY would be penetrants. In some instances, I even have automated assault routines to trigger defensive denial of service attacks against the offending subnet and IP address. Oh yeah, these DoS attacks originate from an offshore network and are nearly impossible to trace/subvert. Good to have friends who speak Russian.

I log ALL activity and regularly review these logs. Any and all suspicious activity is reported to the service providers of the perpetrator, usually resulting in the termination of their service agreement. In fact, most bandwidth providers prohibit even LAUNCHING certain tools like port scanners/sniffers on their subnets.

Regarding the legality issues. I agree with what you said. I only am pointing out yet another paradox created by our esteemed policy makers and enforcers. Yet again we have a case of do as we say, not as we do.