In reply to Indy:
>They now have WiFi snooping vans according to The Telegraph.
And the way to defeat them is with a 99p cat5 network cable from your router to the TV.
There are several legal issues they might face sniffing your wifi connection.
Under RIPA Crapita are not listed, but the may be sub contracted by the Postal Service who do have powers to snoop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000#A...
Then there is the Computer Misuse Act, where they may be seen as 'attempting to gain unauthorised access' to your home network.
Then there is the EU Human rights (Yeah, yeah, I know . We told Europe to bugger off. But we haven't yet.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Convention_on_Human...
And of course there is the technical issue of WPA2 encryption used on just about every home router.
Having spent some considerable time cracking WPA2 myself, in a professional context, I'd be interested to see how they would manage it whilst driving down the road. I have read that the bbc could send data using weird packet sizes, but a lot of routers would normalise those to a standard MTU. As the content is at layer 7 it would be hard to see what's happening if traffic is encrypted at a lower layer.
And then you have router wifi SSID names. Who's to say that the SSID 'home-wifi' belongs to house number 1, or 2 or 10?
The obvious place to do it would be at the ISP. But these days a lot of ISP, don't use webcaches and so would not have the infrastructure in place to spy on people. If they were to provide this data, they can charge for the costs of providing it. So expect to see fines going up, as costs are passed on. (And don't mention proxies and VPN's, as you can get block lists of these, updated daily.)
In short, I think the detector vans are a scare tactic. The usual single mums and old ladies will get frightened and confess. Everyone else will say "I don't have to answer your questions, sod off."
If they were serious about funding the BBC, you'd only have to look in the local paper to see how much court time is taken up by people up before the bench for non payment. If that money was factored in by the government, along with the detection costs, and given to the BBC, I wonder if they would break even?