>On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Milner lists his occupation as “hacker,” and under the category called “Specialties,” his entry reads, “I know more than I want to about Wi-Fi.”
I am more than moderately offended/troubled/irked by this excerpt, as it appears to deliberately depict the engineer as a "hacker" in the sense of Hollywood culture, rather than "hacker" as we know it in makers' terms.
In the wrong hands, the English language is much more potent and destructive than any programming language. An English Specialist can often cause more harm than a Wi-Fi Specialist.
I've long thought that trying to adopt "hacker" as a professional term was a bad idea. I told friends that I was going to a government hackathon once, and they thought I was going to be arrested.
Why do we have to be hackers? What was wrong with being developers?
In the wrong hands, deep knowledge of Wi-Fi can be far more destructive than the conventional methods of a non-technical journalist. It's a new level of power in snooping.
It's a good thing journalists generally do no have Milner's level of knowledge, as surely they too would abuse it. Maybe even worse than Google. Milner's comment reflects the power of the knowledge he has. He has to take some responsibility for it.
Both Google engineers and NYT journalists do snooping on others for a living.
They are just at odds with each other, for various reasons; engineers for companies like Google generally do not like journalists and generally the same is true vice versa.
Google has a genuine PR problem. And journalists are watching their careers disintegrate with the advance of communications technology. It's an amusing little spat to watch.
Given that he developed a "wardriving" application, black hat connotations are not entirely unreasonable. The use of his talents to hoover up data without permission certainly doesn't offer much in the way of defense, either.
Depicting his actions as the work of a rogue “requires putting a lot of dots together,” Mr. Milner said enigmatically Sunday before insisting again he had no comment.
It doesn't sound particularly enigmatic to me. It seems like Milner is clearly saying that Google deliberately misrepresented his behavior as a rogue action to facilitate their legal self-protection when in fact it's obvious from their choice of the author of NetStumbler to work on Street View that his designated role was likely to involve making use of his expertise with Wi-Fi networks.
Of course they hired a WiFi expert for their WiFi-related project. But that doesn't mean their claim of rogue behavior is simply self-protection. What if they hired him for his expertise with Wi-Fi and told him they only wanted to collect the minimal amount of data but he went rogue and collected ALL the data anyway? But I'm with those people that think the freely broadcast unencrypted packets are in the public domain and Google didn't do anything illegal.
It feels to me like they were just logging everything for future analysis so they don't have to come back and do a second pass when they upgrade their software.
But then again I'm sorry, I have never seen what the big deal was about this. If you broadcast your crap around you can't blame people for receiving it.
Sure people's passwords may be in the data stream, but they broadcast it over an open connection. If your going to blame anyone blame the electronics shop sales guy, the hardware vendor and the TV "experts" that tell people that using an unencrypted wifi access point is completely reasonable.
Ethical behavior is not a zero-sum game. Yes, people should have secured their sensitive data, but they didn't. It doesn't make it ethical to record it, any more than it would be ethical to go into someone's unlocked house and sit on their couch and watch TV while they're out.
The data collection, which took place over three years, was legal because the information was not encrypted, the F.C.C. ultimately determined.
Interesting how this works. If I went wardriving and collected personal emails from unencrypted networks, I'd have my house rummaged by FBI agents, be hit with a 25,000-count felony wiretapping indictment and have some go-getter federal prosecutor try to convince a judge to sentence me to 7,000 years in prison. Then an appeals court might say reverse on the grounds that it was unencrypted. Maybe.
Google does it? A slap on the wrist and a small fine for "obstructing an investigation."
That's because the software Google used didn't actively browse the networks to look for documents, but passively intercepted and logged packets. If they wrote a program that actually searched the networks for shared folders and copied information that way, then conceivably they could be guilty of unauthorized computer access.
"The F.C.C. report also had Engineer Doe spelling out his intentions quite clearly in his initial proposal. Managers of the Street View project said they never read it."
I think the authors intended this to be read as 'wink wink yeah sure', but this sounds entirely plausible on both sides. The more detailed the spec is, the less likely anyone will read it. They probably just forwarded it around and assumed someone competent to render an opinion would raise a red flag if anything were not well thought out.
The issue is that it is not just the initial proposal. As the NYTimes article points out in the previous paragraph, and the complete FCC report [1] clearly states, there were additional events after the proposal was submitted where other members of the Street View team came in contact with the actual code while doing code review or debugging, but later claimed during interviews with the FCC that they were unaware that it was collecting data.
On page 15, the report even mentions "Engineer Doe" sending an email to a manager stating, "You might recall asking me about URLs seen over Wi-Fi...", and talking about the number of unique URLs retrieved (only 32,000 from 300 million packets). The manager asked if the URLs were sniffed from WiFi packets, and Doe responded in the affirmative.
The engineer who created this system is completely irrelevant since the production implementation of Street View collected all data.
The fault lies solely with Google whether by intent, lack of legal or legal ethics advice, lack of technical oversight, or management incompetence etc. This also seems to be the regulator's view.
However, Google itself and, of course, the media are quite happy to muddy the waters with a bit of "gone rogue" nonsense, though for differing reasons.
> On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Milner lists his occupation as “hacker,” and under the category called “Specialties,” his entry reads, “I know more than I want to about Wi-Fi.”
While I don't know for sure which use of the word "hacker" Milner intends, the author of this article ought to have added a line like, "Software engineers use the word 'hacker' in a positive, non-malicious sense...", since this is effectively taking his words out of context.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|14 years ago|reply
I am more than moderately offended/troubled/irked by this excerpt, as it appears to deliberately depict the engineer as a "hacker" in the sense of Hollywood culture, rather than "hacker" as we know it in makers' terms.
In the wrong hands, the English language is much more potent and destructive than any programming language. An English Specialist can often cause more harm than a Wi-Fi Specialist.
[+] [-] untog|14 years ago|reply
Why do we have to be hackers? What was wrong with being developers?
[+] [-] goodgracious|14 years ago|reply
It's a good thing journalists generally do no have Milner's level of knowledge, as surely they too would abuse it. Maybe even worse than Google. Milner's comment reflects the power of the knowledge he has. He has to take some responsibility for it.
Both Google engineers and NYT journalists do snooping on others for a living.
They are just at odds with each other, for various reasons; engineers for companies like Google generally do not like journalists and generally the same is true vice versa.
Google has a genuine PR problem. And journalists are watching their careers disintegrate with the advance of communications technology. It's an amusing little spat to watch.
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] branola|14 years ago|reply
It doesn't sound particularly enigmatic to me. It seems like Milner is clearly saying that Google deliberately misrepresented his behavior as a rogue action to facilitate their legal self-protection when in fact it's obvious from their choice of the author of NetStumbler to work on Street View that his designated role was likely to involve making use of his expertise with Wi-Fi networks.
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|14 years ago|reply
Not a chance.
[+] [-] jlawer|14 years ago|reply
But then again I'm sorry, I have never seen what the big deal was about this. If you broadcast your crap around you can't blame people for receiving it.
Sure people's passwords may be in the data stream, but they broadcast it over an open connection. If your going to blame anyone blame the electronics shop sales guy, the hardware vendor and the TV "experts" that tell people that using an unencrypted wifi access point is completely reasonable.
[+] [-] whackberry|14 years ago|reply
You don't see what the deal is with a major corporation doing wardriving and packet capturing?
> If you broadcast your crap around you can't blame people for receiving it.
By your logic then if someone gets robbed on the streets, then it's their fault for "walking around freely"?
[+] [-] nickm12|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenplatt|14 years ago|reply
Interesting how this works. If I went wardriving and collected personal emails from unencrypted networks, I'd have my house rummaged by FBI agents, be hit with a 25,000-count felony wiretapping indictment and have some go-getter federal prosecutor try to convince a judge to sentence me to 7,000 years in prison. Then an appeals court might say reverse on the grounds that it was unencrypted. Maybe.
Google does it? A slap on the wrist and a small fine for "obstructing an investigation."
[+] [-] kinghajj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epikur|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattgreenrocks|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smeg|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinpet|14 years ago|reply
I think the authors intended this to be read as 'wink wink yeah sure', but this sounds entirely plausible on both sides. The more detailed the spec is, the less likely anyone will read it. They probably just forwarded it around and assumed someone competent to render an opinion would raise a red flag if anything were not well thought out.
[+] [-] martey|14 years ago|reply
On page 15, the report even mentions "Engineer Doe" sending an email to a manager stating, "You might recall asking me about URLs seen over Wi-Fi...", and talking about the number of unique URLs retrieved (only 32,000 from 300 million packets). The manager asked if the URLs were sniffed from WiFi packets, and Doe responded in the affirmative.
[1]: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/351298/fcc-report-on-g...
[+] [-] drucken|14 years ago|reply
The fault lies solely with Google whether by intent, lack of legal or legal ethics advice, lack of technical oversight, or management incompetence etc. This also seems to be the regulator's view.
However, Google itself and, of course, the media are quite happy to muddy the waters with a bit of "gone rogue" nonsense, though for differing reasons.
[+] [-] beder|14 years ago|reply
While I don't know for sure which use of the word "hacker" Milner intends, the author of this article ought to have added a line like, "Software engineers use the word 'hacker' in a positive, non-malicious sense...", since this is effectively taking his words out of context.
[+] [-] elliotanderson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epochwolf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whackberry|14 years ago|reply
The public has the right to know. Otherwise, who decides what should be public or not, the ministry of big brother?
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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