To while away the hours, you flip open your laptop and begin surfing the internet's best, most awesome website, Freerepublic.com, when suddenly, nine jackbooted thugs in inpenetrable armored exoskeletons begin raining fists down on you, dragging you out of the car through the wing window (thank you Barrett-Jackson!) and haul you off to prison for 20 years.
Insanity. Is this still America?
What's next? Are they going to throw in you jail for reading a flyer left on your windshield because some merchant got peeved that you didn't buy something from him?
yousent to eop.gov.).
I’m not sure Google was living up to its earlier “do no evil” motto when it was doing this. It sounds like maybe the Google vans were cracking weakly encrypted WEP connections as well as logging nonencrypted connections. I’d be pissed at that.
As for places offering free wi-fi, the ethical thing to do is patronize them, order a coffee or something while in there with your PC.
Reading a ‘broadcasted’ signal into open air is hardly ‘wiretapping’.
....ENCRYPTION............
Are police scanners also “wiretapping”? Is listening to someone talking “wiretapping”?
These are FCC approved transmitters broadcasting on public frequencies with FCC approved receivers. His equating listening in to an old style wireless phone line to receiving publicly broadcast data is beyond wrong, and I can't wait for this ruling to be stomped on.
Anyone with an open wireless wifi connection should be considered to be a public broadcaster who is inviting the public to use their service. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to lock out a network.
not sure but using some ones circiut to send receive is not the same as reading the data someone elses is sending and receiving.
Isnt this the issue,just like stealing some ones dial tone from a land line and making calls is not the same as monitoring those calls
Very. Very, slippery slope.
Go to your network settings right now, and you’ll likely see a list of possible wifi connections in range - and whether they’re secure or not.
Are you sniffing right this very moment?...
Some years ago (maybe this is still the case for all I know), in England you had to pay to listen to over-the-air TV. The TV police would go around with a van equipped with a radio direction finder, looking for the emissions from television local oscillators, and cross-checking them against a database of paid subscribers.
No subscription... a ticket. No concept of "free radio communications" there!
I don’t believe I’m clear on what Google did, but I do have an analogy that works for me on unprotected networks.
I’m walking down the sidewalk. Someone has left a chair sitting by the curb. I’m feeling a little tired, so I sit down for a rest.
Suddenly the police and the homeowner come screaming up and I’m arrested for breaking and entering, on the interesting theory that if the chair had been in his dining room that’s the only way I could have gotten to it.
But, of course, the whole point is that the chair wasn’t in his dining room, it was on the curb.
Moral: If you don’t want someone to sit in your chair, keep it in the dining room. If you set it out on the curb, expect others to sit down.
OTOH, if someone has even the weakest protection on their network, breaking in is IMO just as much a crime as entering a home where someone left the front door open.
I would look at this as a expectation of privacy
If I expect it to be private than anyone snooping is wrong
Just because the lady down the street left a gap in her bedroom shades dose not make it legal for you to go peeking through her window
... you flip open your laptop and begin surfing the internet's best, most awesome website, Freerepublic.com, ...
Ahh - but the difference is that Google is purposefully acquiring and selling the data it is recovering in its wardriving. It's not considered illegal for you to listen in on on unencrypted radio - it is illegal for you to take any action, including rebroadcasting or direct profit from knowledge thus gained. That is where Google fails, IMHO.
Assuming we’re talking about packet sniffing, we’re talking about different levels of use. Using somebody else’s open network, is like using a telephone or electrical outlet they put on the sidewalk. I believe the “sniffing” they are talking about is that Google captures the IP packets and reads them, much like somebody adding their own extension to you telephone at the pole and listening and recording who you communicate with.