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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."
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.
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If I did what google did I could be charged with unauthorized access to a system. Why is there no criminal trial here?
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".
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
Yeah seriously. Why does the German government have to be such a bunch of Naz... oh, I see.
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