On one hand, there are the vandals, or outright criminals, who are using and abusing my property for their gain to my detriment.

On the other hand, there's a passerby who knows about the criminals in the area, knows no one else is looking for them, and trespasses my property because the trail led him onto it.

Now that guy willingly alerts me to the criminals, offers an explanation of what he did on my property and how he found the criminals -- what should my response be?

I know that technically he broke the law, and there are those who want to see anyone and everyone pay for their deeds, but in this situation, wouldn't a reasonable person possibly consider tracking down the criminals first before crying "trespassing!"

I wish there were stronger free-to-roam laws. I don't think anybody has the right to tell another person they can't traverse land so long as they don't enter any structures, do any damage, take anything, disturb any wildlife, etc.

With that said I'm sympathetic to this guy's intent. If I were Yahoo or the FBI and he can prove that innocuous access is all he was doing, let's just say I wouldn't go out of my way to throw the book at him.

Because (going back to IRL analogies again), the authorities writ large have the authority to do an exigent search of my home if there's probable cause of a disaster of some sort going on, but local and Federal LE don't exactly have the same right to go around pwning the entire Internet to look for sites that have already been rooted, so in a sense leaving this issue to the authorities is simply leaving it to no one except the criminals, which is also unsatisfactory.

If the right answer to widespread problems like these is supposed to be law enforcement "patrolling the Internet" in some fashion, then we'd need to have way different legal authorities to allow for that. Until then I'm not sure that "only the criminals can search for burning buildings on the Internet" is really the most pragmatic answer.

In any event we obviously can't rely on each and every single important web site's system administration teams. If even Yahoo can be caught, who can you trust?

yeah right, they'll fix your KDE 2 install on freebsd in a jiffy as well

Until then I'm not sure that "only the criminals can search for burning buildings on the Internet" is really the most pragmatic answer.

It's not a pragmatic answer, it's a matter of fact. NSCIA are busy collecting phone calls and developing backdoors. I'd be careful calling anyone criminal.

If you're not intending this metaphorically, I must disagree. Trespass is a fairly limited act involving a physical presence. Sending and receiving packets with another host that is configured to do that is really not anything like physically inhabiting a place.

Edit: I thought this was an accurate analogy, but I'm assuming the downvoter either disagreed or felt I phrased this as a sarcastic attack rather than an analogy. If it incorrectly came across as the former, that would be my fault, but I don't know if that's what caused the downvote, so an explanatory comment would be appreciated.

I didn't express a stance either way on whether he should be prosecuted for a more minor offense or not, in the analogy's case trespassing. (There are obviously both pros and cons in the precedent set by prosecuting people for revealing their own minor crime on account of reporting a terrible one.)

Plus, using 'murder' and 'family' and 'dead' etc. are too dramatic and personal and unnecessary to convey your point about internet security.