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Warspying in San Francisco
hak_fan writes "SecurityFocus has a story on a group of radio hobbiests in San Francisco who occasionally go out warspying for wireless cameras in the 2.4GHz band, using some customized equipment. Their latest expedition turned up some interesting finds."
Not that you slashdotters would want to know such a thing.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The most fascinating part of this article to me - was the fact that it's NOT a violation of the wire tap act. It seems video isn't considered snooping. Talk about technology out pacing legislation. I wonder how long before we have one of those sites devoted to "hidden camera" porn? Oh, wait...
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
If they found some interesting finds, they left them out of the article. They found exactally what you would think they would find... cameras pointed at places in offices... not the hot lesbian orgy that you would hope for. Besides, isnt this a dupe?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
When you broadcast something, you shouldn't expect it to remain private.
If you want it to remain private, do something.
Encrypt it, or don't send it out to everybody.
From the article:
So the "catch of the night" is a freeway camera. Woo-hoo! Oh well, at least now I know there are bigger dorks than myself.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
Anyone know if the wireless camera detectors they have at Radio Shack (still carry?) work? They were a small cigarette ligher sized detector. Didn't seem to me that it would work all that well...
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
This sounds like a good plot starter for a political thriller.
A college student goes out to look at wireless cameras and witnesses a murder, which is later ruled a suicide by the coroner's office in a massive political coverup. He has the murder recorded on the hard drive of his notebook computer, and shortly after he hands a CD he burned with an MPEG of the murder over to his uncle, a police detective, his uncle is then found dead, another "suicide." Then the kid realizes they'll be coming after him next, and a merry chase ensues.
Has this already been done?
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
I don't know what's funnier -- the fact that the warspying guy's name was "Massive White Dude" (or "MWD" for short), or the fact that the reporter misspelled it as "WMD" in the second to last paragraph...
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I never thought this would happen to me. I was warspying around Clevland and found myself in a low-rent part of town. I didn't want to stop for long, but I glanced at my equipment while stopped at a red light and saw the most beautiful girl in the world. She must have forgotten to turn off the camera, because the things she was doing.... Well, let's just say it was even more exciting than the goats.cx guy, or the thought of Natalie Portman with hot grits down her pants. I went right up to her place, and secured that camera for her by setting up a linux firewall. But the really good part is, I put in a backdoor for myself!
feed the troll .... :-D
rtfa gives you
"This kind of snooping doesn't violate federal wiretap laws, which generally protect audio communication, but not video, says Joseph Metcalf, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon law school. Moreover, the law keeps it legal to monitor radio transmissions that aren't encrypted or scrambled in any way, unless they're in a band specifically protected by statute, like analog cell phone signals. "If a communication is readily accessible to the general public, that communication is not protected by the federal Wiretap Act," says Metcalf. "
Basically if you don't encrypt it it's your fault that someone else can read the signal.
Worst
Nobody has a right to sniff like that.
If you don't want people sniffing you, you shouldn't stink up the place.
This is equivalent to communicating with your neighbours by shouting out of the window and then complaining that people are listening to what you say.
As another poster pointed out, if you're broadcasting, you shouldn't expect privacy. If you're sold a wireless system as a private link, then the people to complain to are the sellers of the hardware for false advertising.
With a little detective work, MWD will eventually discover that the signal is a directional transmission from the camera to a local TV station that features the feed on its website and in its nightly newscast.
So really the trick is to override their feed during the nightly news with more provocative content. It might be amusing to be real subtle about it, such as periodically putting footage from the wrong season or another time of day, CGI-ing the skyline (burning buildings, missing buildings, buildings that aren't really there, etc), using a different city skyline, etc. Just putting the goatse guy on would be a little less interesting.
Ideally you'd have a reachable PC generating the video, with the ability to remotely switch between the real camera's feed and your feed to keep 'em guessing.
All the more ironic that "The Conversation" was filmed in SF.
Wardialing was coined after Matthew Broderick did that activity in the 1983 movie War Games. It was a little bit clever to mutate that into wardriving, but that took the prefix right up to the edge of Fonzie's ramp.
What the hell is this crap? It's NOT neutral. I can see it now...
Reporter: "So Mr. Car Thief..."
Thief: "Please. I prefer the term Vehicle Posession Transferal Agent".
You ARE spying. You're looking where you shouldn't; that's spying, just like eavesdropping on 802.11b is spying; you know your victims are probably not expecting you to be looking, and you know it's wrong. If your neighbor has a 8-foot high shrub, and you stick your head through it to see what's going on in his yard, that's considered intrusive by most of the world unless you know 'em pretty well. It's not considered "viewing". If you put a mirror over the top of the stall in the bathroom to look at the guy next to you, that's spying. Not "viewing".
Why do I get the image of Comic Book Guy reading about MWD? Even the "please, call me..." crap is the same.
Please help metamoderate.
I should hope not. I carry this with me every day. It receives 100KHz to 1.3GHz, and can monitor nearly all analog voice modes. I doubt that this would be illegal in any state, and if it was, the ARRL would be all over them. An amateur radio operator is licensed by the feds. This trumps any state law. IANAL, and this is a gross simplification of the facts, but legal precedents have been set as far as having amateur radio tranceivers in a vehicle.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
The D-Link DCS-1000W is an Ethernet/802.11b wired/wireless camera than can use 128-bit WEP. It's only $200 at CompUSA (the lowest price I could find, even comparing mail order when I purchased it). It has an on-board web server and can even email/ftp date/time stamped images when motion or switch closure is detected (or time based). More here:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=41
If you'd like to use it as a time-lapse security camera, I have a script on Sourceforge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dcs1000w
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.