[AusNOG] OT: Police Wardriving. Where else but QLD!

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2012, Sean K. Finn wrote:

> I'd suggest that they would just bolt it to many or all police vehicles 
> and run it passively.

> I'd further suggest that they'd see if they could find out their IP 
> address through an Internet-accessible probe, and if so, record the IP, 
> and then contact the ISP for subscriber information to mail out 
> information, determine address, and to follow up with.
>
> The article Mentions WEP. It would be interesting to see them either sit 
> outside your house and crack your WEP, determine your IP, then send you 
> a letter in the post, else they would have to triangulate your address 
> or figure out where signal was strongest and have a guess as to which 
> house you are in.
>
> If they weren't going to do it house by house I guess they automatically 
> target streets or blocks where WEP points were detected, but, srsly, if 
> this isn't automated, it's an impossible mission.

Yes I hope it would be automated too although the original report didn't 
give us sufficient information to make an assessment.  They've had 
netbook-like devices in the cars for over 13 years[1] (they were trialing 
GPRS devices when I resigned from QPS in 1999) so I expect they have wifi 
enabled netbooks now which could do the scans automatically with the right 
software.  They could even keep a 'white list' of SSIDs to not contact as 
they are known to use captive portals.  Yes this could be done with very 
little human involvement.

I often hear a lot of nonsense comments about police and policing. 
Mostly I ignore them.  FWIW I never heard about any quotas for traffic 
infringements (or anything else) but no one believes me when I say that.

[1] They weren't called netbooks in those days of course.

Cheers,

Rob (the ex Queensland copper)

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