Vietnam was the first TV war, this could be the first Internet war - Wall St Journal
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Judge rules that Google can be sued under federal wiretap laws
A US DISTRICT JUDGE has ruled that Google can be sued for allegedly breaking federal wiretap laws in its Street View WiFi spying debacle.
A number of lawsuits have been filed against the internet giant after its Street View photo cars picked up data from unsecured WiFi networks, including documents, email addresses and passwords.
Google claims it was an accident and blamed the problem on an engineer who added rogue code to Street View, but a lot of people were not happy to accept its word on that.
Violation of federal wiretap laws was one of the claims leveled against Google in these cases. The company requested that the claims be dismissed, but US District Judge James Ware rejected Google's request, according to Reuters.
While this does not make Google guilty of the claims, it does open the legal doors for it to be sued and tried for allegedly having broken wiretapping laws, which elevates the nature of the case quite considerably.
It can be expected that Google will bring up the issue of intent as a primary defence in these cases, which it might claim differentiates its actions from other cases where phones and internet connections were deliberately tapped.
This latest setback for Google could have been much worse, as there were further claims under state wiretap laws and California's unfair competition rules that were rejected by the judge at Google's request. This means Google will only face federal laws on the matter.
"We believe these claims are without merit and that the court should have dismissed the wiretap claim just as it dismissed the plaintiffs' other claims," said a Google spokesperson. "We're still evaluating our options at this preliminary stage."
This might mean that Google will appeal the decision. µ
Tags: Google
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Looks like I forgot the /sarcasm/ tag for my wiretap joke, sorry :-).
Also, while I won't pretend to be a legal scholar, I have seen innumerable cases in the US of judges ignoring laws, or at least not taking a law literally. And let's not forget judges in different districts issuing rulings which conflict with each other. Anything short of a Supreme Court case is getting harder and harder to take seriously anymore.
Just realized I have internet :), so here's the definition:
http://definitions.uslegal.com/w/wiretapping/
@Spycho Well seeing that a whole judicial system and a US district judge ruled on it (after consulting the books I expect), could it be that you are in fact wrong? And perhaps they know more about it than you?
Disclaimer: At one time my comment here would have been a put-down, but realistically it is in fact possible that an internet idler has it right and a judge wrong currently, western society is well past its peak and assuming things only makes things worse at this point.
So US presidents, time to sign the get-off-free-because-you-are-big-with-money pardon and protection papers eh, after all you can't just do it for AT&T (who of course REALLY wiretapped massively) since that would be favouring one company and be discriminatory.
For streetview .. all they needed as equipment on board the vehicles is a GPS and a camera , they didn't need wifi and a computer that runs attack software to lift their victims personal data in their vehicles. Come on . Really an accident ?
You got to be kidding. Guilty as hell but trying to be nice about it are we Google ? :)
don't you have to tap a wire to be guilty of wiretapping? US law defines radio transmissions as public property, receivable by anyone. There is no law against WiFi eavesdropping. If you don't want your "privacy" violated, then DON'T BROADCAST IT!