wasting police time, contempt of court, etc.

[Adam Atkinson (ETL)]

> > Setting an ethernet card to promiscuous mode and hoovering
> > up everything it sees is not especially hard. Of course,
> > in these days of switched ethernets this is less powerful
> > than it used to be.
> 
> Many switches, such as the Extreme switches popular amongst 
> ISPs and the
> like, have the ability to mirror traffic out of a single 
> port, either as
> a copy of a given physical port, a copy of all the traffic on 
> a VLAN or
> a combination of the two.  If you take an entire VLAN out of a mirror
> port (and you could, for example, use GbE to mirror a switch 100BaseTX
> network) then you have as much power as back in the dark ages before
> switching.

I didn't know about this. Of course, if you're in a position to
change settings on routers or switches then obviously you can
do what you like. With a promiscuous ethernet card, you don't need
special access to anything.