Legal implications of port scanning

I read a post by Fyodor on the Nmap mailing list mentioning two papers on the legality of port scanning, Port Scanning and its Legal Implications and Finding

Fences in Cyberspace: Privacy and Open Access on the Internet
. The author of the latter paper, Ethan Preston, also wrote another paper entitled Computer Security Publications:

Information Economics, Shifting Liability and the First Amendment
which covers the legality of publishing sensitive security information, particularly exploit code. This paper is lengthy but worth a read.

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