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Court Declares Google Must Face Wiretap Charges For Wi-Fi Snooping
New submitter Maser_24 writes with news about continued action against Google for snooping on unsecured Wi-Fi networks when collecting data for Street View. From the article: "A federal appeals court this week ruled that Google could be held liable for civil damages for the company's 2011 scandal involving the company's collection of Wi-Fi data from unsecured hotspots using their Street View vehicles. To come to that conclusion, the court followed a rather unique logic path; according to the court, unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots are not 'radio communications' that are 'readily accessible' to the general public and therefore Google violated the Wiretap Act."
This despite being cleared of wrongdoing by the FCC.
Now charge the NSA for requesting that they do that.
Unencrypted RF communications should be fair game for anyone to receive and record. The fact that it's digital seems to be what swayed the judges in this case. I can't for the life of me understand how this could have happened. I'm not in favor Google's actions, but they were not illegal. Now the law has been twisted and there will be unintended consequences.
That's exactly what this is... In no uncertain terms!
Fuck... Pot, meet Kettle...
WiFi is explicitly radio... and it's readily accessible without any intervention on the users behalf...
I regularly connect to unsecured hotspots without even meaning to...
Blah...
I can't even express how utterly exasperated I am with our government...and the people that keep them in office...
God damn...
Well, there's one thing our government is good at, learning from past mistakes... Those gladiatorial games were great inspiration for our current raft of "populace pacification techniques"... TV, sports, and (to a lesser extent) religion...
When will we wake up... When will the common man stand his ground and tell those in power to go fuck themselves? When?
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
"unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots are not 'radio communications' that are 'readily accessible' to the general public
Every single apartment complex I've lived in/visited would say otherwise.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
So the NSA is performing actual wiretaps and widescale data collection which violates the Constitution and they are facing absolutely no penalties or even pressure from any other branch of government to stop this behavior yet Google is being punished for "wiretapping" by collecting information that was voluntarily broadcasted on public airwaves. At first this didn't make any sense until I remembered Google's recent efforts to encrypt users' data to make it tougher to be collected by government agencies. I guess that's the price they're going to pay for trying to force the government to obey its own Constitution.
Analog cellular phone calls are covered by a separate law (The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986). It not only makes it illegal to record them, it makes it illegal to sell a radio that can receive them (or be easily modified to receive them). Thankfully all mobile phones are digital now. Unfortunately that law is still on the books.
Another court case conflicts with the Google ruling. Back when they were in popular use, the police sometimes recorded wireless phone calls from 46/49 MHz cordless phones (without a warrant). The police used these recordings in court to convict a drug dealer and the drug dealer argued that the communications were private. The courts ruled that they were not. Here is the court ruling from this case: