The BBC is going to intercept WiFi traffic to find people watching iPlayer without paying the license fee

[colonel_mortis]

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/05/bbc-to-deploy-detection-vans-to-snoop-on-internet-users/

 

In the UK, you need to pay a license fee of £145.50 per year per household to watch TV, and the money is used to fund the BBC so that it doesn't have any adverts (some of the money also goes to ITV, Channel 4 and possibly Five as far as I know). As of the 1st September, the law will be changing so you are also required to pay the license fee if you want to watch on demand content on iPlayer (you already needed to pay to watch live TV online using iPlayer, but not on demand), as more and more people switch from watching TV to purely watching content online.

 

The BBC have announced that they will be using surveillance vans to intercept people's wifi traffic to see whether they are watching iPlayer without paying their license fee.

Quote

While the corporation would not disclose how the new technology works, the report states that the BBC has ruled out combing its own records of computers that have logged into the iPlayer website to hunt down non-paying viewers. 

Sir Amyas writes in the document: “The BBC rightly acknowledges that this would be an inappropriate invasion of privacy.”

Instead, electrical engineering experts said that the most likely explanation for how the BBC would carry out its surveillance was a technique known as “packet sniffing”, which involves watching traffic passing over a wireless internet network without hacking into the connection or breaking its encryption.

[...]

Dr Miguel Rio, a computer network expert who helped to oversee the doctoral thesis, said that licence-fee inspectors could sit outside a property and view encrypted “packets” of data – such as their size and the frequency with which they are emitted over the network – travelling over a home Wi-Fi network.

This would allow them to establish if devices at homes without television licences were indeed accessing BBC programmes online.

Dr Rio said: “They actually don’t need to decrypt traffic, because they can already see the packets. They have control over the iPlayer, so they could ensure that it sends packets at a specific size, and match them up. They could also use directional antennae to ensure they are viewing the Wi-Fi operating within your property.” 

This sort of traffic interception would normally be illegal, but the BBC has a specific exception in the upcoming Investigatory Powers Act (aka Snooper's Charter).

 

Personally, I think this is ridiculous - it is far more invasive (and expensive) to send out vans to intercept someone's wifi than it would be to just ask ISPs for the IP address associated with the person that they want to check, and see if it appears in the iPlayer access logs.

[SansVarnic]

Lol and they said the NSA was bad, they said..................

 

 

 

[points if you get the reference]

[LordLeewee]

Fuck me this sounds shady as fuck, and quite rightly illegal. 

Government deems it an illegal and invasive practice, unless they want to use it as a method to charge the general public. Cunts.

[Misanthrope]

And that's legal how? If that's honestly legal and it doesn't gets stopped, Brexit is the least of the UK's fucking problems. Seriously this is next level Orwellian fucking shit.

[AlTech]

And I'm going to continue my daily routine of not using the BBC's website or service

[mikey88772]

Honestly, who's idea was this? It's still an invasion of privacy regardless of how they are getting their information. Just leave the iPlayer people alone, BBC!

[vorticalbox]

4 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

And that's legal how? If that's honestly legal and it doesn't gets stopped, Brexit is the least of the UK's fucking problems. Seriously this is next level Orwellian fucking shit.

It's not legal. They would have to have permission of the house owner and the equipments ower (sky, talktalk) which neither are going to give. also isn't wifi trafic encrypted? 

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/05/bbc-to-deploy-detection-vans-to-snoop-on-internet-users/

 

In the UK, you need to pay a license fee of £145.50 per year per household to watch TV, and the money is used to fund the BBC so that it doesn't have any adverts (some of the money also goes to ITV, Channel 4 and possibly Five as far as I know). As of the 1st September, the law will be changing so you are also required to pay the license fee if you want to watch on demand content on iPlayer (you already needed to pay to watch live TV online using iPlayer, but not on demand), as more and more people switch from watching TV to purely watching content online.

 

The BBC have announced that they will be using surveillance vans to intercept people's wifi traffic to see whether they are watching iPlayer without paying their license fee.

This sort of traffic interception would normally be illegal, but the BBC has a specific exception in the upcoming Investigatory Powers Act (aka Snooper's Charter).

Is this actually legal?

10 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

Personally, I think this is ridiculous - it is far more invasive (and expensive) to send out vans to intercept someone's wifi than it would be to just ask ISPs for the IP address associated with the person that they want to check, and see if it appears in the iPlayer access logs.

This is ridiculous? Ha ha. Jokes on you. It's not ridiculous. This is criminal. This is unacceptable. This is as dodgy as a cop sitting outside your house everyday to see what you're up to.

[LAwLz]

This seems like an overly complicated system which is very impractical.

 

So they will be sitting there, measuring the encrypted WiFi packets, and trying to see if they match one of the sessions going to iPlayer? Remember, WPA2 gets applied at layer 2, so they won't be able to do a simple check of the destination IP.

Edit: They will have to sit there going "okay, this house just sent 4 packets roughly 175 bytes each, and a few ms later 4 packets similar to that just hit our iPlayer server with roughly the same size".

 

It will probably cost them more money to catch someone using the service without paying the license, than the license actually brings in. So is this suppose to be a deterrence? Because it's laughable. What a colossal waste of money.

[AresKrieger]

 

Hmm that van looks legit

[MrCthuntoo]

It's a load of horeshit, just as the original detection vans were.

 

Also quite funny that this could be rendered useless by simply plugging in your device using ethernet.

[AlTech]

Just now, LAwLz said:

This seems like an overly complicated system which is very impractical.

 

So they will be sitting there, measuring the encrypted WiFi packets, and trying to see if they match one of the sessions going to iPlayer? Remember, WPA2 gets applied at layer 2, so they won't be able to do a simple check of the destination IP.

 

It will probably cost them more money to catch someone using the service without paying the license, than the license actually brings in. So is this suppose to be a deterrence? Because it's laughable. What a colossal waste of money.

But this is not legal! This is criminal.

 

It's like someone sitting in a van outside a bank and trying to hack into their electronic system to find out how much money they have.

[iDeFecZx]

I dont see why it matters if you're already paying for a TV licence

[AresKrieger]

1 minute ago, huilun02 said:

 

 

I'm wondering if they were stupid enough to not think of that, though the british government is notoriously tech illiterate, sometimes even more than the US government

[LordLeewee]

1 minute ago, iDeFecZx said:

I dont see why it matters if you're already paying for a TV licence

I don't have one

[aj101202]

Ha WiFi,  my house is wired with ethernet. Good luck 

[SansVarnic]

Here this may help, put it in your front window...

[LAwLz]

3 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

But this is not legal! This is criminal.

 

It's like someone sitting in a van outside a bank and trying to hack into their electronic system to find out how much money they have.

Are you sure about that? I mean, they are not actually decrypting the packets (and according to the OP the BBC has a special exception in some upcoming law). It's just listening to freely available data being sent, and then try and find a relation between that traffic and the traffic hitting their servers.

 

It's a really scummy thing to do, but I am not convinced that it is flat out illegal.

 

 

5 minutes ago, iDeFecZx said:

I dont see why it matters if you're already paying for a TV licence

That's like saying you have no problem letting me into your house to look around if I accused you of having stolen something from me.

It comes down to the idiotic idea that "you got nothing to fear if you got nothing to hide", which is complete bullshit and has been debated to death.

You are essentially saying that you are OK with being treated like a criminal, because hopefully they will find evidence that says you are innocent.

[rattacko123]

20 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

And that's legal how?

Quote

the BBC has a specific exception in the upcoming Investigatory Powers Act

This is what happens when you leave the European Union

[ZestyJalapeno]

[Tech_Dreamer]

"BBC'' indeed..

[Quinnbeast]

12 minutes ago, iDeFecZx said:

I dont see why it matters if you're already paying for a TV licence

 

Why would I pay for a licence if I simply choose not to watch live broadcast TV or iPlayer content? The problem is, if you don't pay a TV licence, they're ultimately making vague accusations that you're a criminal and that you will be investigated (until proven otherwise). The language that the BBC chooses to use goes along the lines of "unlicensed households" - they send out endless stream of letters (hundreds-of-thousands nationwide) with red, bold letters under the name of the occupant, warning you that you might be breaking the law. It's a scaremongering tactic that's works reasonably well.

 

If you want this to stop, you specifically need to declare (on a bi-annual basis) that you are not watching the relevant content. Otherwise, the endless stream of letters and threats of surveillance will resume once again. Meanwhile, I'll continue to pay my Netflix and Amazon Prime subs simply because they don't otherwise fucking threaten me on a weekly basis; and what I save by not paying for a licence covers the cost of the other two just nicely.

[Fetzie]

So this is why they banned leaded paint. Not to protect the children, but to make sure the BBC can check up on the non-payers

[TetraSky]

Wow... Just... WOW.

Can anybody watch content on BBC's iplayer without an account? If so, the simple fix for this would be to require an account(doesn't need to be attached to a cable subscription) to watch content and make people pay the fee either monthly or yearly. It would certainly be a hell of a lot cheaper to implement than going around and try to snoop on encrypted wifi connections.

If it does require an account, wtf BBC?

[Flibblebot]

I call bullshit on this. The wifi traffic is encrypted between a device and the router, so they won't be able to see any actual data, only the number of packets being transmitted between a device and the router. I'm sure that the BBC servers are handling thousands (at least) of requests a second, so to be able to see a random packet between a device and the router and be able to correlate it with a packet hitting the BBC's servers (or vice versa) is going to be virtually impossible - enough that it wouldn't be able to stand up in court if challenged. Even just saying that the BBC uses packets of a specific size wouldn't be enough to conclusively prove that an address was using the iPlayer service.

 

(For those that don't remember, the old style licensing vans used to rely on reading the EM emissions produced by CRT sets to recreate the TV picture and prove that an unlicensed property was watching BBC channels)