How do I stay on the right side of the law while wardriving?
You don’t always have to do anything deliberately to connect (illegally) to someone else’s network. Some client adapters are more “promiscuous” than others and will hook up with any non-WEP AP that comes into range, given enough time to perform a DHCP transaction. This is called autoconnection, and it’s a problem for wardrivers for two reasons: • It’s illegal to connect to a non-public AP without permission. Period. • Some client adapters will autoconnect to an AP, and then place the SSID of that AP in the SSID field of the client adapter’s operating profile. After this, your stumbler program will not log any additional stations with SSIDs other than that one. Your wardrive is then basically over, even if you drive another fifty miles. Avoiding autoconnection is essential. Sometimes it can be prevented by unloading your client adapter’s client utility before setting out on a wardrive. That may not, however, be enough.
My fellow wardrivers and I adhere to a relatively strict code of ethics that can be cooked down to the following: • Don’t look. • Don’t touch. • Don’t play through. In other words, 1) don’t examine the contents of a network; 2) don’t add, delete, or change anything on the network, and 3) don’t even use the network’s Internet connection for Web surfing, email, chat, FTP, or anything else. Somebody else paid for the bandwidth, and if you don’t have permission to use it, you’re stealing it. Basically, unless you have permission, don’t connect. Consider it a matter of personal honor, even when it’s unlikely that you’ll be caught. (If you get too used to feeling that you won’t get caught, sooner or later you will get caught!
