House Bill 495, pending in the New Hampshire legislature, could effectively legalize wardriving. HB 495 doesn't undercut the baseline that unauthorized access to a network is a crime. Instead, it turns the failure to secure a computer network into a form of negligence, by imposing a duty on wireless network owners to secure their networks.
The result is that the the owner's failure to take basic security precautions becomes legally cognizable in court as a defense -- which means that network operators who run blatantly insecure or open wirelss networks couldn't easily win prosecutions. If you want to go to court to stop hackers, you'll need to be exercising reasonable self-help security first. Makes sense.
Full story here.