Is wardriving legal?
The legality of wardriving hasn’t been tested, but few people think that wardriving itself is illegal. What is certainly illegal is connecting to and using networks without the network owner’s permission (which is what most people call “breaking into a network”) and wardriving has taken some hits in the press because network crackers will sometimes use wardriving tools to locate networks to break into. It’s the ancient conundrum of the uses to which tools are put: A crowbar is handy for taking apart pallets for use as firewood, but a crowbar can also be used to break into buildings. Should crowbars then be illegal? Hardly. The gotcha is that this is a very new phenomenon, and the law hasn’t entirely caught up with networking as a whole, much less the peripheral issues that emerge with regularity from the seething cauldron of technology innovation.
The legality of wardriving hasn’t been tested, but few people think that wardriving itself is illegal. What is certainly illegal is connecting to and using networks without the network owner’s permission (which is what most people call “breaking into a network”) and wardriving has taken some hits in the press because network crackers will sometimes use wardriving tools to locate networks to break into. It’s the ancient conundrum of the uses to which tools are put: A crowbar is handy for taking apart pallets for use as firewood, but a crowbar can also be used to break into buildings. Should crowbars then be illegal? Hardly. The gotcha is that this is a very new phenomenon, and the law hasn’t entirely caught up with networking as a whole, much less the peripheral issues that emerge with regularity from the seething cauldron of technology innovation. To keep wardriving legal, it’s important to 1) obey the law as it exists today, and 2) do our best to encourage journalists to draw the dist
