><i>On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Milner lists his occupation as “hacker,” and under the category called “Specialties,” his entry reads, “I know more than I want to about Wi-Fi.” </i><p>I am more than moderately offended/troubled/irked by this excerpt, as it appears to deliberately depict the engineer as a "hacker" in the sense of Hollywood culture, rather than "hacker" as we know it in makers' terms.<p>In the wrong hands, the English language is much more potent and destructive than any programming language. An English Specialist can often cause more harm than <i>a Wi-Fi Specialist</i>.
<i>Depicting his actions as the work of a rogue “requires putting a lot of dots together,” Mr. Milner said enigmatically Sunday before insisting again he had no comment.</i><p>It doesn't sound particularly enigmatic to me. It seems like Milner is clearly saying that Google deliberately misrepresented his behavior as a rogue action to facilitate their legal self-protection when in fact it's obvious from their choice of the author of NetStumbler to work on Street View that his designated role was likely to involve making use of his expertise with Wi-Fi networks.
It feels to me like they were just logging everything for future analysis so they don't have to come back and do a second pass when they upgrade their software.<p>But then again I'm sorry, I have never seen what the big deal was about this. If you broadcast your crap around you can't blame people for receiving it.<p>Sure people's passwords may be in the data stream, but they broadcast it over an open connection. If your going to blame anyone blame the electronics shop sales guy, the hardware vendor and the TV "experts" that tell people that using an unencrypted wifi access point is completely reasonable.
<i>The data collection, which took place over three years, was legal because the information was not encrypted, the F.C.C. ultimately determined.</i><p>Interesting how this works. If I went wardriving and collected personal emails from unencrypted networks, I'd have my house rummaged by FBI agents, be hit with a 25,000-count felony wiretapping indictment and have some go-getter federal prosecutor try to convince a judge to sentence me to 7,000 years in prison. <i>Then</i> an appeals court might say reverse on the grounds that it was unencrypted. Maybe.<p>Google does it? A slap on the wrist and a small fine for "obstructing an investigation."
"The F.C.C. report also had Engineer Doe spelling out his intentions quite clearly in his initial proposal. Managers of the Street View project said they never read it."<p>I think the authors intended this to be read as 'wink wink yeah sure', but this sounds entirely plausible on both sides. The more detailed the spec is, the less likely anyone will read it. They probably just forwarded it around and assumed someone competent to render an opinion would raise a red flag if anything were not well thought out.
The engineer who created this system is completely irrelevant since the production implementation of Street View collected all data.<p>The fault lies <i>solely</i> with Google whether by intent, lack of legal or legal ethics advice, lack of technical oversight, or management incompetence etc. This also seems to be the regulator's view.<p>However, Google itself and, of course, the media are quite happy to muddy the waters with a bit of "gone rogue" nonsense, though for differing reasons.
> On his LinkedIn page, Mr. Milner lists his occupation as “hacker,” and under the category called “Specialties,” his entry reads, “I know more than I want to about Wi-Fi.”<p>While I don't know for sure which use of the word "hacker" Milner intends, the author of this article ought to have added a line like, "Software engineers use the word 'hacker' in a positive, non-malicious sense...", since this is effectively taking his words out of context.