Beware! someone is watching you

Los Angeles, April 22: No one in the evening crowd at a Starbucks in Pasadena knew Humphrey Cheung.

But Cheung, quietly sipping hot chocolate and working on his laptop, knew things about them.

Several tables away was a guy sitting alone with his own laptop. “He’s starting a business,” Cheung said. And the young couple in the far corner? “They’re getting married,” he confided.

Cheung isn’t psychic. He had hacked into the coffee shop’s wireless Internet connection on his Toshiba laptop. It took him all of about five minutes to do so, using free software available online.

Public Wi-Fi is very handy for perusing the Internet away from the office or home. Just remember that you may have company while surfing.

Once hooked into the system, Cheung was able to monitor the online activity of other laptops in the shop.

Luckily for the people around him, he wasn’t snooping for any reason except to make a point: As wireless hot spots proliferate, the tools for secretly monitoring these Internet connections are becoming more sophisticated.

“When people are on a public wireless connection, they have the same expectations about privacy as when they are on the Internet at home,” said Cheung, 32, a computer security expert and an editor for TGDaily.com, a technology news website.

“But it doesn’t work that way. Someone could be listening in.”

Cheung was using a “sniffer” program that intercepted online signals as they flew back and forth from the laptops to a wireless modem hidden somewhere amid the coffee paraphernalia.

Mostly, the monitoring was limited to tracking the websites being visited. Numbers correlating to Web addresses flew across Cheung’s computer screen, allowing him to see that the couple were viewing pages belonging to a wedding planning site.

The man a few tables away started with sites selling high-speed broadband service. He went from there to a page about managing websites.

Like in a mystery yarn, the clues kept coming in. “You start to get a story about someone,” Cheung said.

Suddenly, the line “LLCs in the state of California” popped up on the screen. An LLC is a limited liability company, a type of business structure often used by small-business owners.

“He’s in Google," Cheung said. “That’s a search he typed in.”

Sure enough, the next stop was a California secretary of state site with information about forming LLCs.

When approached, the man, Alex Auzers, 20, of Pasadena, confirmed that he was doing research on starting a business.

Asked if he had searched the exact phrase, “LLCs in the state of California,” Auzers looked stunned. Then he shook his head.

“Is someone using a sniffer program?” he asked.

Auzers also is in the computer field — he hopes to start a business that would service residential setups.

“I feel kind of stupid,” he said, “because I know that kind of thing can be done.”