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Comment by epochwolf | Hacker News Reader

I've done some of my own wireless sniffing on campus. I didn't actually realize it's a federal crime to do so. Oops.

What's the difference between taking a picture in a public place (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of visible light) and sniffing Wi-Fi signals (a.k.a. measuring the photons of the wavelength of radio)? Public photons are public photons, it seems arbitrary to distinguish them based on wavelength. How can it be a crime to measure the photons passing all around us, sometimes literally through us? The originators of these photons are knowingly sending them into the public, so they should have no expectation of privacy, just as we have no expectation of privacy for the photons that reflect off us into someone's camera on the street.

The difference is humans can see the visual spectrum but not the radio spectrum. This means that people tend to ensure their own privacy in the visual spectrum (by wearing clothes, etc), but don't in the radio spectrum (by transferring sensitive data unencrypted).

You could argue that people are being irresponsible by not paying more attention to their "radio privacy" (and you'd be right), however the lawmakers apparently felt that the advantages of making it illegal outweighed the disadvantages.

If I recall, and I'm not a lawyer, a large part of privacy law is asking whether there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. Not many people go around sniffing the wireless, you can reasonably assume that no one is listening at a given moment. Visible light in public are being sampled all the time by many observers.

Tell that to the cops next time you're standing on public property photographing a bridge. Or a border crossing. Or the Pentagon. Or the cops.

Given that realisation, I'd have thought not admitting in public to having comitted a federal crime would jump higher up your priorities!

I worry more about the local police.

I was investigated for threatening to burn down the campus a couple of years ago. Supposedly I talked about it to someone on campus over the summer. I wasn't enrolled for summer classes and I hadn't been near the campus for 5 weeks when I was reported to have been there.

I can't count the number of times I've had my laptop banned from the school network because I plugged into a mis-labeled ethernet jack. I'm on some list with the system administrators. I've filed more bug reports than anyone else. On top of this I use an encrypted vpn to prevent them from eavesdropping on my traffic.

If the FBI wants to investigate me for my comments on this site, they are welcome to it.

Good luck making a case with no evidence and no witnesses.

Also, how is listening to a Wifi radio any different than listening to your police scanner or AM/FM radio? I'm not convinced that passive packet capture is a criminal activity.

Why is you putting a knife in someone considered attempted murder in one case and assault in another and an accident in a third?

Why is computing an algorithm that undoes DRM illegal and one which predicts weather not?

Why is building something electronic and selling it legal, unless there's a bit of paper in an appropriate office somewhere in the country describing what you've built?

We don't legislate things based only on the precise actions of what people are doing, but also the social and mental contexts in which people do them. And listening to an FM radio station is a different act in a different context to listening to a police radio station or a privately owned laptop's WiFi card.

I'm not saying I know it is a criminal activity, just that it's not as simple as saying "well it's like listening to public FM radio so it must be legal.". It isn't like it, and that conclusion doesn't necessarily follow.

Why is you putting a knife in someone considered attempted murder in one case and assault in another and an accident in a third?

This would be a good analogy if knives were being constantly broadcast into my head.

Also, since it's impossible to prove that you listened to a radio transmission, I don't see how any law against listening to public Wifi would be enforceable.

(Example: saying "I've smoked pot" on the Internet. I just confessed to a crime, but probably won't be spending much time in prison for it. A confession is not enough proof.)

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