Gregg Keizer reports:

People using the Firesheep add-on may be breaking federal wiretapping laws, legal experts said today.

Or maybe not.

“I honestly don’t know the answer,” said Phil Malone, a clinical professor of law at Harvard Law School as well as the director of the school’s Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Malone also served for more than 20 years as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice.

Firesheep, which was released just over a week ago and has been downloaded nearly half a million times since, is an add-on to Mozilla’s Firefox browser that identifies users on an open network — such as a coffee shop’s public Wi-Fi hotspot — who are visiting an insecure Web site. A double-click in Firesheep gives its handler instant access to the accounts of others accessing Twitter and Facebook, among numerous other popular Web destinations.

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