SURVEILLANCE: THE BACK STORY Can We Sniff Wi-Fi? Implications of Jo e v. Google

Th e US Court of Appeals issued an opinion that Wi-Fi sniffi ng can violate the US Wiretap Act. If it stands, the ruling may signifi cantly impact computer security education, in which Wi-Fi sniffi ng is a common student exercise; security practitioners, who sniff for security assessments; and computer security research, where it’s common to sniff in order to fi nd vulnerabilities. O n 27 December 2013, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued an opinion that intercepting data from unencrypted wireless local area networks—Wi-Fi sniffi ng—can violate the US Wire-tap Act (18 USC §2511).1 Th e anti-sniffi ng opinion is another milepost in the long-running batt le between Google and privacy advocates over Street View, Google’s project to photograph all the planet’s streets and neigh-borhoods and make the data freely accessible over the Internet. It also marks an important step in the evolu-tion of US privacy law and has the potential to place in legal jeopardy scores of computer security students