Just read an interesting article on El Reg about Adam Laurie, who has supposedly been ‘hacking’ satellite feeds. Unless I’m missing something it appears to be more a case of sniffing unencrypted communication coming from and going to satellites, but it is interesting in any case.
One of the parts of the article I liked was the comment on the UK’s Privacy laws:
A resident in the UK, Laurie says he’s careful to obey the country’s privacy laws. While he is able to identify certain traffic as email, for instance, he doesn’t actually read the contents of the message. Still, he says it isn’t always easy to follow the letter of such laws because they prohibit people from receiving a message if they aren’t the intended recipient.
“It’s a bit of a quandary,” Laurie says. “You can’t tell you’re not supposed to see that data until after you see it. I can’t unsee what I’m not supposed to have seen.”
Whilst I’ll agree that some of the privacy laws are ‘strange’ the actions Laurie took was looking for traffic in which he wasn’t the intended recipient for any of it, as someone pointed out: if you’re concerned you might be breaking the law you can stop looking.
— Andrew Waite