THE ROAD WARRIOR

Talking on his mobile phone while driving between jobs in Southern California, Frank Keeney looks like an operative straight out of a spy flick.

While he chats nonchalantly with a journalist, the front seat of his SUV is a buzz of electronic activity. A laptop computer running a network-sniffing program called Kismet is communicating with an antenna sprouting from his roof and a GPS transceiver mounted on the dash. Meanwhile, a wireless LAN card hooked to the laptop is scanning the horizon for any activity over the unlicensed frequencies.

“In the time I've been talking to you, I've logged 68 different access points,” Keeney said. “That's just on the way from Irwindale to Pasadena.”

Keeney is a war driver. He's taken it upon himself to map out the vast wireless landscape of Southern California, noting every wireless access point and every wireless LAN from San Diego to the San Fernando Valley.

The term is derived from “war dialing,” an old hacker trick of the '80s: A hacker uses a dial-up modem to randomly dial phone numbers until it encounters the analog tones of another modem — and thus the gateway to another network. War driving is far less intrusive. It's the equivalent of listening to truckers yak over the CB waves or tuning into a police scanner. The difference is that Keeney picks up raw streams of data. If a wireless network is unencrypted, he can pick up every e-mail, every credit card transaction, every download. All are logged on his laptop computer like a digital diary of Southern California.

The surprising thing is almost every network Keeney encounters is just that: unencrypted. Because a wireless network doesn't have the physical limitations of a fixed-line network, a hacker doesn't have to get into the network via the Internet or physically tap into a line. Wireless LAN access points are there for the whole world to use. And more often than not, cracking that password is as simple as hitting the “enter” button on your keyboard.

“It's appalling how many networks are wide open, and not just small home networks,” Keeney said. “When I'm parked in front of a retailer, every item purchased is recorded on my laptop from the bar code scanners. I've driven by biotech firms that have wide-open access points. The same goes for law offices.”

Keeney is trying to bring awareness to the problem. He hosts online forums and posts news on Pasadena.net. He also lectures at hacker conferences and runs his own network security consultancy.

While many of the networks' owners probably wouldn't be too thrilled to know they have an electronic eavesdropper, Keeney points out there is nothing illegal about what he's doing. He has in fact consulted with the FBI about the problems of unencrypted wireless traffic and disables all network protocols on his laptop to prevent it from even accidentally logging into a stranger's network.

If you want to keep Keeney out, however, all you have to do is install factory-ready encryption software. “If done correctly, a wireless network can be more secure than a wireline network,” Keeney said. “All you have to do is turn it on.”