By termination point I mean the termination point of the communication covered by the TIA act, e.g. a VOIP phone for a VOIP call or an email server for an email, Im not talking about packet types. This is the term that the AG lawyers used when I was querying them about this law.Originally Posted by HitThemLow
Under the TIA act taking a copy of or "reading" a covered electronic communication is considered to be prohibited under the act. So if a covered communication happens to be transferred over a wireless network, and your tool either took a copy of it, or you "read" it onscren somehow that would be illegal under the Act. Obviously this will involve grabbing data packets. If you didnt access data packets, then it wouldnt be illegal under this particular Act - but it might be illegal under some other Act Im not aware of.
If the beacons were the only thing you were capturing, then under this particular Act, you would probably be fine.
This is why I said "It can be illegal" in my post, because it depends on how you are monitoring those wireless networks.
The decision would likely be based on case law and interpretation by the judge. Who knows how that would go. I wouldnt expect the judge to have a decent understanding of IT so they may not interpret it as you do.It would ultimatly fall down to whomever was judging him. But as far as I personally amconcerned, he is not doing anything bad (since he is not connecting) so at least dont ban the poor guy
IANAL, but I dont think notions of whether its transferred over your property is a consideration under this law. Otherwise you could probably tap phone calls if the line went over your property. Anyway, as long as you dont sniff data packets you should be fine regards this Act though. Use of something like Kismet for example would probably be OK, because it doesnt take a copy of the traffic and it doesnt let you (as in a human in front of the keyboard) make sense of the contents of any communications transacted over the link. Also, dont forget this law is only applicable in Australia, laws in other jurisdictions may be enforced slightly differently.
You would have to take some action to read those letters on your lawn, just as you would have to take action to violate the TIA Act on a wireless network by reading or copying data packets.
Well, that wouldnt be covered under the TIA Act, because in that example you wouldnt be "reading" the communication from between the two termination points of the communication, you're listening in from outside the communication channel.
