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Wireless drone sniffs Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, phone signals By: Declan McCullagh August 4, 2011 11:19 AM PDT LAS VEGAS--Forget Wi-Fi war driving. Now it's war flying. A pair of security engineers showed up at the Black Hat security conference here to show off a prototype that can eavesdrop on Wi-Fi, phone, and Bluetooth signals: a retrofitted U.S. Army target drone, bristling with electronic gear and an array of antennas. "Nobody's really looking at this from a threat perspective," said Mike Tassey, a security consultant who works for the U.S. government intelligence community. "There's some pretty evil stuff you can do from...

A local Washington DC television news station wanted to do a WiFi "hack." Their plan was to sit in a local coffee shop (named after the Pequod's first mate) and try to read their neighbors' e-mail or Web browsing. They had a simple question for me: "Is it legal?" This raises a series of questions about how people are -- deliberately or accidentally -- breaking the law with WiFi. In fact, using someone else's wireless signal -- even if only to get Web access -- might constitute a felony. So could reading other people's cleartext communication, or even just putting...