Re:Google staff 'knew of wi-fi snooping'
by sigil on Monday April 30, 2012 @11:28AM
(#3909634)
Is passive war-driving illegal? The only precedent I've found is State v. Allen (1996) [1] where war-dialing was ruled legal so long as one didn't actively try to gain access beyond the connection to the "public interface."
As billpg points out in [2], in passive war-driving you have to receive the whole 802.11 frame before you even know if it's a beacon frame, which ostensibly was Google's primary interest here. Is it odd that Google stored all captured frames to disk? It's true, they could have just logged network information and discarded the frames. Then again, consider that the default in kismet is to save both a log of networks and a pcap dump. So this may have just been an engineering shortcut -- collect the data and process it centrally.
As billpg points out in [2], in passive war-driving you have to receive the whole 802.11 frame before you even know if it's a beacon frame, which ostensibly was Google's primary interest here. Is it odd that Google stored all captured frames to disk? It's true, they could have just logged network information and discarded the frames. Then again, consider that the default in kismet is to save both a log of networks and a pcap dump. So this may have just been an engineering shortcut -- collect the data and process it centrally.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=State_v._Allen
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3908794