This is a couple days' stale (sorry, I'm still on the road, today at the O'Reilly OS X Convention, and so I'm going to be very sporadic), but it's a goodie: The FBI are wardriving Washington, DC, with a laptop and a Pringles-can antenna (I saw Rob Flickenger, inventor to the Pringles antenna blush to the tips of his ears yesterday when he heard this!). And, as usual, they're issuing scary warnings about the possibility that your network will be taken over by wardrivin', warchalkin' baddies.
You know that there are invaders on most coporate networks today, invaders who are wreaking real, non-hypthetical damage on these networks. They are email worms and viruses, like Klez, and they're spread because of real, containable security errors. Why aren't the FBI running around "warmailing" the Internet to see who's running Outlook and unpatched W2K/W95 machines?
Feds are obsessed with wireless and its romantic accoutrements for the same reason we are, of course. We love this stuff because it's cool. It's romantic. We run around with chalk and Pringles cans and we feel like women and men of mystery and moment. Whenever a filmmaker wants to show a hacker doing something daring, they are inevitably tempted to gussy up the screen with pirate jingles, 3D rotating holographic skulls, and so on. That's because real-hacking is cinematic death. Staring at a prompt for hours, and then getting a different prompt, is hardly cinematic gold. The camera loves warchalking and warwalking and war-whatevering, and moreover, it has that tactile, haptic brain-reward.
The I think that warchalking and wardriving strikes at the same deep chord in the soul of the Fed cop. Most cop work, is, of course, sitting at a desk. Imagine how fantastically dull it would be to be a Fed cop assigned to tracking down email worms — getting long briefings from nerds on DLLs, ploughing through obfuscated VB script, looking at inscrutable email headers — Zzzzzz.
Think about this for a sec: Fed cops want to believe that warchalking is going to lead to hacking and cracking and spamming and the whole quartet of the Horsemen of the Infocaplyse. They want to believe that they'll get to run around in the dark and dirty streets and chase down perps with high-tech antenna triangulation. They want to believe that they're going to get to be cops, not bureaucrats.
(Thanks, John, and the other John!)
