6 ms·

If they look in the window and start writing observations down in a notebook, I probably would call the police.

by jbay808 6y ago

Grazester 6y ago
And what could the police do for that really besides tell you close your blinds if the person was not on your property?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  At some point that might count as stalking?
- catalogia 6y ago
  The could tell the note-taker to fuck off. Police often tell people to fuck off when they're not doing anything that's illegal.
shadowgovt 6y ago
That's a bad analogy for an unsecured wifi. Wifi is radiated energy in radio spectra. They're not looking through your window; you're shining a flashlight through your walls and they wrote down the pattern you're strobing into the street (and that pattern isn't even secret; you're using the common pattern everyone uses to send messages intended to be universally understood).
- jbay808 6y ago
  Radiated energy in the radio spectrum is very different than radiated reflected energy in the optical spectrum?
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    It goes through walls and curtains, for starters. In radio, we're all living in glass houses. ;) Privacy guidelines and analogies around what is and is not acceptable to view emitting from someone's domicile start to break down when everyone's in a glass house.
    - afiori 6y ago
      but we do not live in glass houses[1] and privacy is not defined in such specific terms. I am told that I am no good at making analogies, but I will try my best. Assume I am cursed with the magical ability of seeing through walls. I can freely spend my time staring at my neighbors an spy all of their domestic lives. This is clearly different than if a non-magical me were to install spy-cams in their houses, but we agree that I should not _stare_. Given the hypothetical and magical nature of the situation it is impossible to say whether this would be illegal or not, but soft-anonimity is an important social concept. [1] off topic: I caught myself pondering about how the thickness of walls/ceilings necessary to build a stable house out of glass (especially considering seismic areas) would probably make the walls quite opaque.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
        > but we agree that I should not _stare_ In the radio spectra, we do not. It is generally neither punishable formally in US law nor considered informally to be bad form to hook up an aerial and see what you can hear. There's a whole hobby space around amateur radio, and in the US, it's never been considered the fault of the listener if they hear something the sender would have preferred they not. Your analogy breaks down because your neighbors aren't sitting passively in their homes while you stare at them; they're having a rave with all the wall-penetrating radiation emitters they've installed. They could cease doing that if they wanted a bit more privacy. Or, more practically, they could take the basic necessary steps to encrypt their inter-device communications. If I pop my laptop open right now and look at the SSID list I can receive from the dozen houses on my block, am I being rude?
        afiori 6y ago
        > In the radio spectra, we do not. But in the neighbor analogy we do, that is it is perfectly fine for my neighbor to stare at their walls, less so if they can see through it. > If I pop my laptop open right now and look at the SSID list I can receive from the dozen houses on my block, am I being rude? As far as I know I would need to play with my wifi drivers to store all the unencrypted data packets that reach the wifi antenna. I know that I am broadcasting some information about my wifi (at least the name, probably more), but I expect my neighbor not to methodically try and spy on me. The same way I expect them not to install a security camera pointed at my windows. I am blasting "radiation" also every time I speak or press a key on my laptop and similarly I expect my neighbor not to install a matrix of super sensitive microphones to record every word I say or try and reconstruct what I am writing from the sound and rythm of my key-presses (it was possible in some research projects I saw some time ago). In the radio spectra the only difference I see is that it is unreasonable to demand of people that are already using antennas to filter out all unencrypted wifi data. I understand why this might be legal, I still think that google exploited and is clearly on the wrong side of morality regarding storing also the unencrypted payloads.
- afiori 6y ago
  Legal arguments based on geometry are not particularly solid. My phone antenna technically catches a lot of wifi traffic, the difference is that most of it is not retained/analyzed. Overall, again, it comes to expectations, and in this case to massive indiscriminate surveillance. A lot of thing changes if in the previous analogies "one neighbor" is replace by "an army of drones/employees patrolling the streets" Moreover passive monitoring is an attack from a cybersecurity perspective, that wifi makes it possible is a vulnerability of the protocol and it is not nice for google to exploit said vulnerability.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I'm talking about the moral / "common sense" space. If you want to get into the legal space, the FCC's finding in Google's case is that it can't be considered "wiretapping" to observe and record publicly-broadcast, unencrypted data. Discussion on the topic: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ The relevant section of law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 "It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person... to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public." The FCC interpreted unencrypted broadcast wifi to be such signals. ... and at least when I was a young hacker, learning at my mentor's knee, the expectation was to assume that if one neighbor could do it, an army of drones could. After all, we didn't put firewalls on our home routers because our neighbors could access our poorly-configured Windows defaults to back-door our machines; we did it because such machines would be co-opted into a bot-net by random anonymous hackers. Data being dumped out of your house into the street is in the commons. If one doesn't like that, one should probably take the most basic measures to stop doing that. It's naive to expect either the law or society to step in and stop people from picking it up; there's a whole radio hobby around what a person can hear with an antenna and a bit of quartz crystal, and both American law and American culture have been extremely consistent that it's not the listener's fault if they pick up something interesting.
    - 6y ago

If they look in the window and start writing observations down in a notebook, I probably would call the police.

Grazester 6y ago

And what could the police do for that really besides tell you close your blinds if the person was not on your property?

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
At some point that might count as stalking?
catalogia 6y ago
The could tell the note-taker to fuck off. Police often tell people to fuck off when they're not doing anything that's illegal.

shadowgovt 6y ago

That's a bad analogy for an unsecured wifi. Wifi is radiated energy in radio spectra. They're not looking through your window; you're shining a flashlight through your walls and they wrote down the pattern you're strobing into the street (and that pattern isn't even secret; you're using the common pattern everyone uses to send messages intended to be universally understood).

jbay808 6y ago
Radiated energy in the radio spectrum is very different than radiated reflected energy in the optical spectrum?
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  It goes through walls and curtains, for starters. In radio, we're all living in glass houses. ;) Privacy guidelines and analogies around what is and is not acceptable to view emitting from someone's domicile start to break down when everyone's in a glass house.
  - afiori 6y ago
    but we do not live in glass houses[1] and privacy is not defined in such specific terms. I am told that I am no good at making analogies, but I will try my best. Assume I am cursed with the magical ability of seeing through walls. I can freely spend my time staring at my neighbors an spy all of their domestic lives. This is clearly different than if a non-magical me were to install spy-cams in their houses, but we agree that I should not _stare_. Given the hypothetical and magical nature of the situation it is impossible to say whether this would be illegal or not, but soft-anonimity is an important social concept. [1] off topic: I caught myself pondering about how the thickness of walls/ceilings necessary to build a stable house out of glass (especially considering seismic areas) would probably make the walls quite opaque.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago
      > but we agree that I should not _stare_ In the radio spectra, we do not. It is generally neither punishable formally in US law nor considered informally to be bad form to hook up an aerial and see what you can hear. There's a whole hobby space around amateur radio, and in the US, it's never been considered the fault of the listener if they hear something the sender would have preferred they not. Your analogy breaks down because your neighbors aren't sitting passively in their homes while you stare at them; they're having a rave with all the wall-penetrating radiation emitters they've installed. They could cease doing that if they wanted a bit more privacy. Or, more practically, they could take the basic necessary steps to encrypt their inter-device communications. If I pop my laptop open right now and look at the SSID list I can receive from the dozen houses on my block, am I being rude?
      - afiori 6y ago
        > In the radio spectra, we do not. But in the neighbor analogy we do, that is it is perfectly fine for my neighbor to stare at their walls, less so if they can see through it. > If I pop my laptop open right now and look at the SSID list I can receive from the dozen houses on my block, am I being rude? As far as I know I would need to play with my wifi drivers to store all the unencrypted data packets that reach the wifi antenna. I know that I am broadcasting some information about my wifi (at least the name, probably more), but I expect my neighbor not to methodically try and spy on me. The same way I expect them not to install a security camera pointed at my windows. I am blasting "radiation" also every time I speak or press a key on my laptop and similarly I expect my neighbor not to install a matrix of super sensitive microphones to record every word I say or try and reconstruct what I am writing from the sound and rythm of my key-presses (it was possible in some research projects I saw some time ago). In the radio spectra the only difference I see is that it is unreasonable to demand of people that are already using antennas to filter out all unencrypted wifi data. I understand why this might be legal, I still think that google exploited and is clearly on the wrong side of morality regarding storing also the unencrypted payloads.
afiori 6y ago
Legal arguments based on geometry are not particularly solid. My phone antenna technically catches a lot of wifi traffic, the difference is that most of it is not retained/analyzed. Overall, again, it comes to expectations, and in this case to massive indiscriminate surveillance. A lot of thing changes if in the previous analogies "one neighbor" is replace by "an army of drones/employees patrolling the streets" Moreover passive monitoring is an attack from a cybersecurity perspective, that wifi makes it possible is a vulnerability of the protocol and it is not nice for google to exploit said vulnerability.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'm talking about the moral / "common sense" space. If you want to get into the legal space, the FCC's finding in Google's case is that it can't be considered "wiretapping" to observe and record publicly-broadcast, unencrypted data. Discussion on the topic: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ https://www.wired.com/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/ The relevant section of law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2511 "It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person... to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public." The FCC interpreted unencrypted broadcast wifi to be such signals. ... and at least when I was a young hacker, learning at my mentor's knee, the expectation was to assume that if one neighbor could do it, an army of drones could. After all, we didn't put firewalls on our home routers because our neighbors could access our poorly-configured Windows defaults to back-door our machines; we did it because such machines would be co-opted into a bot-net by random anonymous hackers. Data being dumped out of your house into the street is in the commons. If one doesn't like that, one should probably take the most basic measures to stop doing that. It's naive to expect either the law or society to step in and stop people from picking it up; there's a whole radio hobby around what a person can hear with an antenna and a bit of quartz crystal, and both American law and American culture have been extremely consistent that it's not the listener's fault if they pick up something interesting.
  - 6y ago