[AusNOG] Google creepier than Conroy?

[Scott Howard]

On Sat, May 29, 2010 at 9:59 PM, phil colbourn <philcolbourn at gmail.com>wrote:

> I agree that if a WiFi access point is considered a telecommunications
> system under the Act then intercepting any data that is for
> another recipient is in breach of the Act.


Define "intercepting".

Wifi is a broadcast radio communication mechanism.

Every client and every AP will receive and interpret every packet sent by
every other AP within range.

If your neighbor has a Wifi base-station running on the same channel as
yours (or even possibly on a nearby channel), then your AP, your notebook,
and very possibly your mobile phone is receiving, decoding, and acting upon
every single packet that it sends.

Is that "intercepting" ?

Some of these packets from your neighbors AP will be dropped by your client
- probably in hardware although not necessarily.  But some of the packets
from their AP - probably around 100 of them every second - will be pass
through to your OS.

Is that "intercepting" ?

On numerous occasions your OS will then display data from those packets on
your screen, or log them to a file.  It'll do that whenever you ask is to
display any networks that are in range, and possibly at other times as well.
Turn on any form of wifi debugging and you're probably going to log a lot of
those packets to disk very quickly.

Is that "intercepting" ?

If Google is to be believed (and I for one don't have any reason to doubt
them), they intended only to capture and log the beacon packets. Given that
every other computer within range would have also captured and acted upon
those packets I really don't see how this could be considered "illegal" -
it's a fundamental part of Wifi, somewhat equivalent to the house numbers
printed on your letterbox.  Perhaps we can also claim invasion of privacy if
they were to write down those street numbers as they drove past?

What it seems they did wrong was to skip the filtering stage.  Anyone that's
ever played with any low-level Wifi diagnostic tools will be able to tell
you that it almost always requires _more_ effort to only dump beacon packets
rather than all packets.

Ohh.. and I hope nobody has a has ever physically plugged a computer into
someone else network that used hubs, because exactly the same thing happens
there.  Is that "intercepting"?

  Scott.
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