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KINGPIN

a few blocks away. At Max’s direction, they asked for a room high above the street. Max positioned himself at the window, booted his laptop, plugged in the antenna, and began scanning for Wi-Fi networks.

In 2003, the world was going wireless in a big way and bringing a massive security hole with it. The revolution had begun with Apple’s Air-Port wireless access point and then was joined by hardware makers like Linksys and Netgear. As hardware prices dropped, more and more companies and home users began breaking free of the tethers of their blue Ethernet cables.

But the wireless gear being ushered into homes and offices around the country was a hacker’s dream. It overwhelmingly employed a wireless standard called 802.11b, which included an encryption scheme that, in theory, would make it difficult to jump onto someone’s wireless network without authorization or to passively eavesdrop on computer traffic. But in 2001, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley revealed a number of severe weaknesses in the encryption scheme that made it crackable with ordinary off-the-shelf equipment and the right software. And as a practical matter that technical black magic was usually not even needed. To speed adoption, manufacturers were shipping wireless access points with encryption turned off by default. Businesses small and large simply plugged in the boxes and forgot about them—sometimes assuming falsely that their office walls would keep their networks from seeping out onto the street.

A few months before Max went to jail, a white-hat hacker had invented a sport called “war driving” to highlight the prevalence of leaky networks in San Francisco. After slapping a magnetically mounted antenna to the roof of his Saturn, the white hat cruised the city’s downtown streets while his laptop scanned for beaconing Wi-Fi access points. After one hour in the financial district, his setup would find close to eighty networks. A year and a half had passed since then, and San Francisco, like other large cities, was now blanketed in an invisible sea of network traffic, available to anyone who cared to dip in.