Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

This is a biased article as it doesn't highlight any of the reasons why the judge did it.

In fact skimming the judgement the Judge seems to have an exceptional understanding of technology and how it relates to law. IANAL, but he seems to be saying if he allows WiFi to be called a 'radio communication' then it will suddenly be legal to wiretap a lot of things that are presently illegal.

Quite specifically the judge mentions:

Section 2511(2)(g) makes it lawful to intentionally intercept any radio communication that “that relates to ships, aircraft, vehicles, or person in distress,” without reference to whether such radio communication was readily accessible to the general public and not scrambled or encrypted. Should the Court interpret radio communication so broadly within the Act to include such technologies as wireless internet and cellular phones, this exception could lead to absurd results. Specifically, pursuant to this interpretation, an unauthorized intentional monitoring of a cellular phone call could be lawful should the content of the communication relate to vehicles or persons in distress, but unlawful otherwise. Further, Section 2511(2)(g) makes it lawful to intentionally intercept any radio communication transmitted by “any marine or aeronautical communications system,” which could lead to equally arbitrary results when applying the exception to communications technologies other than radio broadcast technologies, e.g., a Wi-Fi network aboard an airplane.

Note the any radio communication and that the act actually doesn't prohibit that interception even if it's scrambled or encrypted.

His problem is that if he allows Google to call Wifi radio communication suddenly it's legal to wiretap people's encrypted wifi traffic as long as it relates to vehicles or if it's aboard a plane or boat.

Basically, in my brief scanning, he seems to be saying 'Congress, this could open an absurdly tricky loophole if I say yes, please do something'.

I have to agree that the article is very biased. The judge also says that if he interprets "radio communication" to include all technologies that transmit over radio waves, then it contradicts existing 9th circuit precedent that classifies cell phones as "wire communication". It seems like the judge understands the technology well enough, but is struggling to come up with a legal interpretation that makes sense.

Sounds more like the judge has a particular conclusion he wants to reach, and interprets the law accordingly.

> Sounds more like the judge has a particular conclusion he wants to reach, and interprets the law accordingly.

Which is how judges often work....

Yea, I think the law itself is flawed here in the classification.

EDIT: WHOOPS! Retracted. See mattmanser's reply.

While the wording of the statute is certainly problematic, this assertion by the judge is, I would argue, mistaken (p. 3):

In order to view the contents of the data packets captured by the wireless sniffer in a readable form, the packets must be stored on digital media and then decoded using crypto-analysis or a similarly complicated technology. [...] As such, the data packets are not readable by the general public absent this sophisticated decoding and processing technology.

He seems to be confused about the fact that Wi-Fi networks may or may not use encryption; he's assuming they always do, when in fact the networks from which Google was gathering information were only the open ones, i.e. those not using encryption.

In fact I'm sure there are generally available apps -- maybe even for cell phones! -- that allow one to collect the same information. (If there aren't, they could certainly be written easily enough.) Surely this makes it "readable by the general public".

The other thing to remember here is that this is not anything close to a final ruling against Google; the judge simply declined to dismiss all the charges that Google was moving to dismiss (he did dismiss two out of three). The result is simply that the remaining charge can go to trial.

No, you've made a mistake. That's taken from the Plaintiff's allegation and the judge didn't write that.

Check the top of page 2:

Plaintiffs allege as follows: then everything indented is from the Plaintiff's claim including your quote. Plaintiff's claim finishes page 4.

Also note the final judgement at the end of the whole thing, Judge dismisses in favour of Google on two parts of their motion. Just to highlight this is a complicated judgement.

This made me read more...

See page 20, line 10 and read onwards, the Judge clearly understands the difference.

And further to that the Judge specifically calls out the underlying basis behind your objection and saying it's misplaced. (page 21, line 8)

On another note, I had no idea but this would seem that the Judge is saying that if you are caught running wireshark with your network card on promiscuous setting in a public wifi you are wire tapping. It's fine to connect to the network, just not listen to other people's packets.

Which seemed totally outrageous when I first realized it, then totally made sense the more I thought about it. After all, phone cables are publicly accessible, it's fine to use them for your phone calls, moment you hook up a physical wiretap to the publicly accessible telephone lines, boom, you're wiretapping.

Yeah the law seems badly worded..we also have situation of GPS not being exempted when used by non vehicle entities..ie the Police can ask cell carrier for gps info without warrants whereas if its a vehicle gps than they have to have a warrant..or did I understand it wrong?

"presumption of accessibility" should apply to a broadcast SSID.

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