Germany Finds Kismet, Custom Code In Google Car

theodp writes "While waiting for a hard disk of Wi-Fi data that Google says its Street View cars gathered by mistake, the Hamburg Information Commissioner's office performed tests on a Google Street View car in a controlled environment with simulated wireless networks and issued the following statement: 'For the Wi-Fi coverage in the Street View cars, both the free software Kismet, and a Google-specific program were used. The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.' Interestingly, a 2008 academic paper — Drive-by Localization of Roadside WiFi Networks (PDF) — describes a similar setup, and its authors discuss how they 'modified Kismet, a popular wireless packet sniffer, to optionally capture all packets received on the raw virtual interface.' Computerworld reports that lawyers in a class-action suit have amended their complaint to link a Google patent app to Street View data sniffing."

Comments

So how can the computer do it then?

[Dunbal]

The Google-specific program components are available only in machine-readable binary code, which makes it impossible to analyze the internal processing.

      No. It makes it very difficult and tedious and impractical to analyze. It is not, however, impossible.

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[ArbitraryDescriptor]

So does this make them the 1st or the 10nd type of person?

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[Dunbal]

zero-one, please.... all you little endian people who count the wrong way around...

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[Monkeedude1212]

That is so 1.

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to rain on your parade, but 01 is the little endian binary encoding of 2. Little endian means least significant byte (or in this case, bit) first, which is the 0.

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[dgatwood]

Huh? 01 in little or big endian encoding is the encoding for decimal 1, not 2. In either encoding, 2 is encoded as 10. We haven't had reverse-bit-order CPUs in decades. Endianness defines the order of bytes, not the order of bits within a byte.

In big endian notation, 1 can be encoded in a 16-bit value as 00000000 00000001, whereas in little endian notation, it would be encoded as 00000001 00000000. Big endian notation is the order that we naturally use for mathematics. Little endian only makes sense if you think that it is useful to be able to cast between pointers to integers of different length and get the right result if the value is small enough....

Maybe what's confusing you is that documentation uses different standards for numbering the bits; IIRC, IBM's documentation calls bit 0 the 2^0th bit, whereas Intel's documentation calls bit 0 (or maybe 1) the leftmost bit. (Or is it the other way around? I forget.) That's just a numbering convention for bitfield values, and has nothing to do with the way an actual multi-bit value is printed or stored.

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[shutdown -p now]

Do you write the current year as 0102?

I prefer 0x0A14.

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[SQLGuru]

If you're going to be anal, at least know what the F you're talking about.

What does 15 have to do with it?

Re:So how can the computer do it then?

[AmiMoJo]

Little Endianess came about because mainframe designers wanted to extend their architecture to multiple bytes per word in a backwards compatible way. Intel copied the architecture for its 8088 CPU (in fact I think that the 4004 and 8008 might have been based on them too, at least at the instruction set level) and eventually also the 16 bit stuff.

IMHO x86 is the perfect example of an inferior product that came to dominate the market anyway. For 15+ years now CPUs have not executed x86 code directly but rather translated it to microcode which is more like those other, better architectures.

WTF

[BitZtream]

You can be sued for listening to signals bombarding you without your consent?

Heres an idea ... don't want people to hear your private conversations? STOP SHOUTING IT SO EVERYONE WITHIN 300m or more can hear you!

Whats next? They'll charge people with treason and throw them into the oven because someone over heard them standing in the middle of Berlin screaming state secrets?

Re:WTF

[Hatta]

You can be sued for listening to signals bombarding you without your consent?

Old news

Re:WTF

[Lunix Nutcase]

I know! What next? People whining because their government is installing cameras all over their towns? I mean if you don't want to be filmed everywhere you're going by a Big Brother government JUST STOP GOING IN PUBLIC!!

Re:WTF

[Dogtanian]

I mean if you don't want to be filmed everywhere you're going by a Big Brother government JUST STOP GOING IN PUBLIC!!

True. I really don't have a problem with it. I also understand that when I'm in public, I'm IN PUBLIC VIEW. Its really not hard unless you're an idiot. If you don't want people to know you're doing something, do it in the privacy of your own home. Don't get pissed off when someone sees you do something in a public place.

He said filmed, not seen. There's a difference... in fact, there's an absolutely *massive* difference that's really not hard to see "unless you're an idiot".

In fact, there's a difference between being seen by ordinary people in a public place- as has happened for thousands of years, and which set our expectations of what "in public" means- and what has happened within less than the past generation which means that you may be viewed and recorded remotely.

I find all these "anything you do in public is fair game" type arguments miss the point that modern technology fundamentally changes what "in public" means. Rather than being seen by (possibly) a few people in your immediate surroundings with limited memories, and without the expectation of your every move being tracked- unless this was being actively done by (e.g.) a policeman- you can now be passively and automatically viewed and tracked from a distance and anything you do recorded for an indefinite period of time.

Maybe this is the way it already is in some places- but we should be asking if this is the way it *should* be.

And "in public" hasn't ever been the free-for-all that you and others imply. In a free society- people can, and have in the past been able to, go where they liked, take photographs (for example) and so on... it was "in public"... right? Yet I'm willing to bet that it still wouldn't have been socially- and possibly not legally- acceptable to follow one particular person round constantly taking photographs and watching what they were doing (even without interfering) without good reason?

It's in public... if they don't like it, they should be in the privacy of their home- right? Oddly enough, no.

In short, the "in public you should have no expectation of privacy" is not as clear cut as some think. And the fact is that technology changes the game *without* the rules being changed. We haven't been in this situation before, we should be asking the questions and considering new social and legal issues brought up by this... not spouting pat answers based on a misrepresentation of previous social conventions that were never exactly like that anyway.

If I did what google did...

[morphotomy]

If I did what google did I could be charged with unauthorized access to a system. Why is there no criminal trial here?

Re:If I did what google did...

[Lunix Nutcase]

Because you're not a multinational corporation with $20+ billion in revenue and a whole division of lawyers?

Re:If I did what google did...

[yyxx]

The question of whether passive reception of WLAN packets constitutes "unauthorized access" is legally not settled in the US. Actually, it really isn't legally settled in Germany either, but it is now being settled as part of this anti-Google hysteria.

From a practical point of you, nothing would happen to you because nobody would ever find out. People have been recording WLAN packets for years and nobody noticed or cared.

Re:Inaccurate

[Lunix Nutcase]

This is a posting by theodp. He found a simple RESTful web API to be too complicated. You actually thought he would be able to understand binary?

Tsk tsk

[stevegee58]

They're not being evil now, are they?

Re:Tsk tsk

[merreborn]

They're not being evil now, are they?

Collecting data isn't (necessarily) evil. Abusing it is.

For example, google's well known for finding web pages that were intended to be private, but never properly locked down -- phpmyadmin installations, router admin pages with no passwords, etc.

Finding those things isn't evil. Were google to, say, forcibly install software on every unsecured router their crawlers found, *that* would be evil.

Are they being evil? Maybe. But data collection itself isn't necessarily evil.

Is this how they can do wifi location detection?

[jeffmeden]

I know a little bit about IP geolocation, but when I got an iPod touch and fired it up for the first time on my home network I was *stunned* to see that it pinpointed my location to within one or two houses when using the Google Maps app despite having no GPS and no other identifiable information entered into the device. Maybe they are using this data to drive geolocation based on SSID instead of IP? Can anyone explain how else IP geolocation can be so accurate?

Something I've had a hard time understading...

[Em Emalb]

Something I've had a hard time understanding through all this is WHY they thought it was a good idea to record SSIDs and other information while doing a street mapping.

I don't understand what they were hoping to gain from this information?

According to our research, 72.438% of people don't secure their wireless.

According to our research, (I'm assuming they got mac addresses too, right?) 83.4% of all wireless consumer routers in Germany are Linksys routers.

WTF does that have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with mapping streets?

Oh, and for the people getting all up in arms because "people are shouting this information freely and anyone can hear it"...that's patently FALSE. There's maybe 1% of the population that has the know-how or the desire to do that. It is NOT AT ALL event remotely the same as standing in the middle of the street yelling at someone where anyone can hear you. You have no choice but to over hear if you happen to be in the area. You do, however, have a choice in downloading packet-sniffing software and using it on someone's wireless network, unsecured or not.

Re:Something I've had a hard time understading...

[0100010001010011]

Google location API. Doesn't matter if the network is secure or not.

"Hey I found AA:BB:CC:DD:EE at this location"

Person with iPod Touch or other device with wireless only sends to google: "Hey I see access points AA:BB:CC:DD:EE, AA:BB:CC:DD:FF and AA:BB:CC:DD:00" Google goes: "Yea, you're around here".

Go to google maps with a new version of Firefox or Chrome. Click on the button that just has a circle in it. It'll ask for permission to send your location and should show you where you are on the map.

Re:Something I've had a hard time understading...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have no idea what use snippets of unencrypted data from unsecured networks would be. There just isn't much there that isn't either blatantly illegal and/or terrible PR that you can't learn just by having one of the world's larger Ad networks.

SSIDs, though, make a lot more sense. Wi-fi APs, while by no means completely static, provide an incredibly dense network of individually identifiable radio transmitter nodes. If your receiver knows its location(via GPS fix from a good GPS unit), and knows what APs are nearby(ideally with directional antennas), you can turn that into a database that devices with no GPS can use for rough location detection by means of any 802.11a/b/g/n card(or, as is frequently the case with cellphones, devices with ghastly GPS antennas and/or chipsets can use nearby APs to assist their GPS). Skyhook Wireless already has such a database(among other customers, Apple contracted with them to give their non-GPS iDevices some degree of location ability), I don't know if other outfits do as well. Since Google was already going to the expense of having GPS and camera equipped cars drive all over everywhere, it seems quite logical to throw a few wi-fi antennas on the cars and get an AP geolocation database for minimal additional cost.

Re:Something I've had a hard time understading...

[Anonymous Coward]

Something I've had a hard time understanding through all this is WHY they thought it was a good idea to record SSIDs and other information while doing a street mapping.

Its called making a map. You travel around, and note features and details. SSIDs are a mapable feature. Knowing that SSID xyz is visible from 123 anystreet and from 125 anystreet, but fades out by the time you reach 127 anystreet helps you to define a location.

I don't understand what they were hoping to gain from this information?

As some others have mentioned previously, by correlating physical locations with visible SSIDs they gain the ability to provide maps and directions to people using devices with WiFi instead of GPS.

According to our research, 72.438% of people don't secure their wireless.

According to our research, (I'm assuming they got mac addresses too, right?) 83.4% of all wireless consumer routers in Germany are Linksys routers.

WTF does that have ANYTHING AT ALL to do with mapping streets?

It has nothing to do with anything... its just a summary of statistical observations.

Oh, and for the people getting all up in arms because "people are shouting this information freely and anyone can hear it"...that's patently FALSE. There's maybe 1% of the population that has the know-how or the desire to do that. It is NOT AT ALL event remotely the same as standing in the middle of the street yelling at someone where anyone can hear you. You have no choice but to over hear if you happen to be in the area. You do, however, have a choice in downloading packet-sniffing software and using it on someone's wireless network, unsecured or not.

Not exactly. Your router is broadcasting this information clearly to anyone with the capacity to hear it. It is not being broadcast at a frequency that the human ear can detect without assistance, but every single wireless device within range can hear it. Turn on your laptop, go to the configuration for the wireless network connection. See the part where it lists the SSIDs of wireless networks in range? There you go...

The concept of "someone's wireless network" is a bit of a misnomer. There are just a bunch of devices having conversations at the same time. Its a lot like being in a big reception hall talking to your friend while there are other people having conversations around you. What differentiates your conversation from someone else's conversation is simply what you choose to focus your attention on. You can hear them, they can hear you, you just choose to ignore the conversations that don't involve you. That's how wireless devices work. They typically ignore conversations that don't involve them... but they can still hear them going on.

Re:Something I've had a hard time understading...

[Em Emalb]

If you don't know how to operate your equipment properly, maybe you shouldn't be using it. If you do, don't be surprised when it doesn't behave as you expect.

I personally DO know how to operate my equipment properly. I am not up in arms over this because it affects me personally, but because people who don't know any better.

As I said in an earlier post, my wifi is secured and hidden. Does that mean someone couldn't sniff the traffic coming from it and decrypt it? Of course not. Would it make it harder to do? Sure.

In your analogy, you're saying that if you connect to a web server and get a response, it's reasonable to assume you have permission to use that web server. Sure. But what if you do port scans and find an obscure port "reserved" for something other than http or https traffic and connect that way? Are you headed down a slippery slope there or is it just fine, even if the owner of the web server didn't intend for you to connect to that port?

(I'm just asking, I really don't have a horse in this race.)

Re:Something I've had a hard time understading...

[Em Emalb]

How is not securing your wireless indicative of not being able to "operate" machinery properly?

If I leave my front door open and you steal from me, that doesn't mean you're not a thief does it?

Wow brainy argument!

[Anonymous Coward]

Try intercepting someone's cell phone signals - with your dumb argument, you should be able to listen to them too and not get sued. Ditto with so many governmental wireless traffic. Hell, you cant even photograph someone on the street, esp. cops - see yesterdays posts, without their permission, and you are ok with one entity picking up every signal in every neighbourhood ???

Common man - use some brains before you just type some crap !

Re:Wow brainy argument!

[Hatta]

Try intercepting someone's cell phone signals - with your dumb argument, you should be able to listen to them too and not get sued.

You should, absolutely. Just as if you were overhearing a walkie talkie. If you don't want it heard by the public, don't broadcast it. If you need to broadcast it, encrypt it.

Re:Wow brainy argument!

[poetmatt]

it's one thing to intercept, it's another to decode.

Neither are impossible, and both are hard to prove unless someone admits it or is caught in the act.

As was noted, this is broadcasted unencrypted information they obtained. Anyone else could have. Going after google is just going after the easy target.

Re:Wow brainy argument!

[Damek]

Everytime I understand what someone says in French, I'm both intercepting their signal and decoding it.

What's the difference between one language broadcast in sound waves, and another broadcast in radio waves?

I'm not sure how I feel about this one way or the other, but it doesn't seem clear cut to me.

Re:Wow brainy argument!

[jbezorg]

And by the same logic, if you don't want to be mugged on the street you should stay at home.

They are broadcasting this information either through ignorance or by their own will, they are making this information available to the public. So to bring the use of theft as a comparison back to relevancy, the question I have to ask you is this:

If someone is throwing money out of their window onto a public sidewalk, do you feel the public the right to take that money?

If someone did take the money, do you think it would be fair to charge them with theft?

Finally, have you ever found money in the street and kept it?

To me, it's the difference of finding a credit card on the street and finding cash on the street.

For a Credit Card. This has been authorized for use for specific individual(s) and to use this item, a person must intentionally misrepresent themselves knowing that if they were to present their real identity, they would be denied access. i.e. encrypted wireless communication.

For cash. Something that everyone is authorized to use. I see no problem. i.e. unencrypted wireless communication.

Re:Wow brainy argument!

[Fractal Dice]

If you can't see that it is the same concept, then the conversation needs to continue. Property lines are an arbitrary invention of society restricting freedom of snooping - the same framework of norms and expectations we apply to geography can be applied to any terrain/medium, including airwaves.

Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[DontLickJesus]

There isn't anything inherently illegal about what they did, unfortunately. Encrypt your networks folks. However, being a professional user of the Kismet application I would contend that using Kismet shows that all the data collection was far from "accidental".

Re:Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[DeadCatX2]

I dunno...maybe if it was aircrack or even wireshark, I would be worried, but I don't see the big deal about Kismet. After all, they were looking for SSIDs/MACs.

I still don't see the big deal about this. If someone photographed you standing in front of your living room window, would you scream "invasion of privacy!!!!!!111eleven" or would you just close the blinds?

Even better analogy...if someone aimed a camcorder out of their window and drove past while aiming it around and saw you for a couple of seconds through your window, would you scream "invasion of privacy"?

Re:Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[Mr. Freeman]

What do you mean "unfortunately". It's almost as though you think that having a law against it will stop EVERYONE from intercepting your data. You DO realize that criminals will still analyze your data, right?

And no, using kismet does not show that the data collection was intentional. There are many uses for any network monitoring tool, even those tools that CAN capture lots and lots of data.

Re:Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[ElectricTurtle]

I agree. Google looks really a lot worse in my eyes not because they picked up some packets, but because they lied about their intent to pick up some packets. It's very Clintonesque. I could care less if Billy C. got some action from an intern, but it was the lying about it that made it heinous.

If you're caught, just admit it. Looking bad in the eyes of some dumb luddites is not worse than looking like a sleazy liar to absolutely everybody.

Re:Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[ElectricTurtle]

If I were a woman who had been jizzed on by the Commander in Chief, I might have kept the dress too.

Re:Not really illegal, but wreaks of dishonesty

[TapeCutter]

"The case of it being "accidental" could depend on their intentions."

DBA #1 : "What fields do they want?"
DBA #2 : "You'll never know until the projects over, give them everything and let them work it out."

Re:There are worse intercepts besides a few wifi p

[Hatta]

Yeah seriously. Why does the German government have to be such a bunch of Naz... oh, I see.

Re:Inaccurate

[schon]

He found a simple RESTful web API to be too complicated. You actually thought he would be able to understand binary?

And it was a Google RESTful API, as this is a Google binary... so obviously Google would have created it to be so complicated, only Google staffers could understand it!

And the mention of the paper on wireless sniffing? What the fuck does that have to do with Google? Did they sponsor it? No. Did their employees write it? No. Did their employees participate in it? No. But he mentions it just because it re-inforces the conclusion he wants you to draw.

Glenn Beck would be so proud!

So.. when do we call out this idiot as an MS shill?

Re:Is this how they can do wifi location detection

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

To the best of my knowledge, Apple's wi-fi based geolocation is based on Skyhook's offering in the area.

It is quite plausible to assume that Google, since they were already going to the expense of running the cars, figured that they could grab their own geolocation dataset for virtually no additional cost. However, their massive corporate wardrive episode is hardly the first of its kind, as Skyhook's products demonstrate.

Google Denies It, Looks for Scapegoat

[eldavojohn]

For what it's worth Google claims that patent is totally unrelated and they're also trying to find someone they can pin this on so their multinational company doesn't take any of the heat. Remember, it's just one engineer behind this and once we find Scapegoaty McSeverancePackage this can all be put behind us and you can rest assured that Google is back to Do No Evil status. Ha.

Re:Is this how they can do wifi location detection

[Hurricane78]

A company named Skyhook Wireless is doing this. They are continuously driving trough whole continents with cars, mapping out wifi routers/stations/etc.
They are what gives the iPhones/iPods their navigation (they have to real GPS). They are behind Maps Booster which plugs right into the Symbian (Nokia & others) geolocation APIs. (I bought it for 3€, and while it is less exact than GPS here, it also works inside buildings. Plus it makes first-time GPS satellite locking much faster.)

I wonder how this is different from what Google does, though.

But I don’t have a problem with SSID logging anyway. I mean, people who rely on SSIDs for security, really are idiots anyway. It’s not worse than knowing an IP. I can’t see where privacy could be a concern here. And I’m extremely strict about my privacy rules.
I think it’s a good service. Hell, how could I not think that paying 3€ for someone to drive across every street on the continent is a good deal?

P.S.: No, I’m not affiliated. And I repeat: It’s not very exact here. I am lucky if I get 50m accuracy. While my A-GPS can get down to 3m. (Oh, and if anyone of you know a service that requires no further hardware, and can get down below 50 cm [ideally below 10cm], please contact me! :)

Now we can find out once and for all ...

[tomhudson]

They're not being evil now, are they?

It depends - the government should disassemble the code and see if the evil bit is set.

Kismet

[Itninja]

I guess it was just destiny for this to happen.

Re:Is this how they can do wifi location detection

[ttldkns]

I'm not sure how google does it but the iPod uses skyhook wireless location services. If you read the blurb from their website they tell you about how they use clustering to self heal their location network in between readings, which don't need to happen very often.

I've moved house a few times and taken my routers with me and i've watched the iPod maps app switch between the old location and the new one for a few days depending on how many other networks it can see. After a few days, though, the system has "healed" itself and consistently finds the correct location.

Bad journalism

[MikeK7]

Correct me if I am mistaken, but not a single journalist seems to have picked up on why Google has been collecting the data. I thought that it was obvious, yet many of the above posters don't seem to get it either.

don't be such an idiot

[yyxx]

The wonderful thing about the law is your data is protected on any network, at any level of encryption and using any base station you like.

You are totally naive if you think your data is protected because some data protection czar makes a name for himself going after an American company. Going after Google isn't going to protect your data one bit. The only reason Google is playing along with this charade is because they really are a legitimate business and the data really is of no value to them. The people you really have to worry about are people who use that data to defraud and blackmail you, and compared to the other crimes they are committing, whether they capture your packets or not is totally irrelevant.

Furthermore, you are effectively required by law in Germany to encrypt your WLAN anyway; if you don't, you're almost certainly breaking both data privacy and copyright law.

In fact, given that the data protection agency is now getting this data, I see no legal reason why they shouldn't search through it for violations of German privacy law, copyright law, and German content restrictions. They could charge thousands of people with crimes based on the data. Maybe that would drive the point home to the morons who think that what's been happening in Germany protects anything.