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Comment by bkjelden | Hacker News Reader

Say someone is renting out a room on AirBNB, and they also have some dropcams monitoring the perimeter of their house.

Someone rents the room, and runs this script, disabling the cameras.

During the stay, the property is burglarized, and there is no surveillance footage of the crime because the renter disabled the cameras.

That seems like an incredibly messy legal situation. Would the renter even be able to exonerate themselves? They disabled the cameras, it almost feels like they inadvertently framed themselves for a crime they didn't commit.

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To commit a criminal offence, one needs the criminal act (actus reus) and the guilty mind (mens rea). If someone deactivated the security system (actus reus) with the intent (mens rea) of helping someone else burglarize, that would definitely be a crime. However if someone deactivated the security system and without criminal intent helped a criminal, then it would be a much murkier issue. Most countries have various offences on the books for criminal negligence to deal with this situation.

On the other hand if the homeowner or the insurer wished to SUE someone for disabling the security system and thereby facilitating the loss of property, that someone would most likely be fucked. Civil liability doesn't require the accused to be the sole cause of the damage; one can be a contributory cause and still get roasted for huge damages. IANAL and this comment is not legal advice

(1) According to the article, disabling the wireless camera itself may be a crime in the US. If so, there are a host of ways the participant could face criminal liability under the described facts.

(2) Civil liability does require, generally, causation--cause-in-fact and proximate cause. The cause-in-fact test is a simple "but-for" assessment: but-for our guy disabling the wireless, would the robbery have happened? In this case, yes, in the absence of our guy disabling the wireless, the bad guy would have still robbed the house. Disabling the wireless did not cause the robbery, the criminal was acting independent and without knowledge of the wireless camera's being disabled. Proximate cause is a more complicated legal standard, but since cause-in-fact is missing here, our guy isn't liable, and your second point is probably incorrect.

Disabling the cameras would make it much harder to identify and catch the thief and therefore recover the stolen property. And so, on a balance of probabilities, 'but for' disabling the cameras the damage (loss of property) would not have occurred.

I see what you're saying, but there's a strong argument to be made for finding the camera-disabling guest negligent. If I was advising a client I would never state things as matter-of-factly as you did, but maybe its okay in the court of HN.

And "but-for" the police's inability to catch the bad guy, the plaintiff would have recovered his stolen goods as well, right? And "but-for" the Chief hiring the detective in charge of the case, the plaintiff would have been more likely to recover his property. And on and on. He should sue them all as well.

A lawyer who doesn't quite yet understand factual causation or the limitations imposed by proximate cause would do well to hedge an answer like this with a client. A knowledgeable lawyer, however, would win this on SJ.

[edits: typos]

The US has lots of "strict liability" offences that don't require mens rea. The mere act is enough to constitute an offence.

Even more clearcut, all the cameras in all the neighbouring flats get disabled (this is actually the reason why jamming is illegal -- EM radiation doesn't know to respect property boundaries).

It looks like the script uses arp-scan to detect cameras. That is an ethernet-level tool so it will detect only devices on the wifi network your computer is connected to, not all networks within range.

Yep, you're right. An 802.11 client broadcasts the MAC address in every frame in plaintext, so a more straightforward approach would be to use `airodump-ng` to list the cams. The innocent bystander practical & legal concerns were probably the reason author did it this way.

This particular script is not really a jammer in the traditional sense. It's simply a de-auth command to a specific device on a specific network. So with a little care you could ensure you were only dropping the indoor cameras.

The FCC considers sending deauth packets "jamming" according to https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-15-113A1.pd...

Its more subtle than that.

The FCC considers sending deauth packets to networks you are not supposed to be in control of jamming.

So, still a bad thing here, but not quite the same reason.

De-authing the camera from the wireless network isn't necessarily going to stop it from recording. Manything for instance will pile up footage offline and sync it when it gets an internet connection again... should probably be clarified in the article that it's not stopping the recording but merely disrupting the internet connection of the camera

> Would the renter even be able to exonerate themselves?

If you can convince the cops to do their job, then yes?

If my apartment was burgled when I was at work and my new roommate had the day off, the cops would -hopefully- do some investigation to determine if anyone else might have possibly entered the space, as well as checking and enquiring with pawn shops and grey-market street vendors for my stolen goods.

The cops are not going to go looking for your lost stuff for you. I know this from experience.

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