Steal WiFi: 5 years in prison.

Darryl Collins, local poster-boy for entrepreneurship, writes about how nicking Wifi is bad.

I caught this piece on Radio 4’s “You and Yours” last Thursday. I was so incensed by the lack of balance they were giving the issue of people accessing open wifi networks that I went back and listened again.
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The Home Office call it “theft of bandwidth” and that “stealing that internet space is potentially an offence under the Computer Misuse Act and Communications Act”

The penalty is up to 5 years in prison!

I think that Darryl agrees with me when I suggest that anyone running a Wireless network in 2008 should reasonably be expected to secure their network to their desires. I wrote about it here and here.

As I said:

Next they’ll be arresting people for illegally smelling the perfume and aftershave of people as they walk past. Or illegally hearing conversations spoken aloud in a public place.

The government are taking this very seriously of course and have assigned someone to look after all of this. He has to, of course, be utterly out of his depth when talking about technology. Days like this make me want to become a politician. But not that much.

Careful, Darryl, your blog could be considered an admission of guilt.