I am drawing on a bunch of explanations held in slightly fuzzy memory here, but IIRC the guy is doubly screwed:

- the police see it as use of service to which the accused is not entitled, thus a form of theft

- the lack of entitlement is enforced by [either law or contract, I forget] that telecom services delivered to the property are for the use of the owner, his family and guests or somesuch. The wishes of the householder are not taken into account because domestic “consumers” are not allowed to offer a “public service” without registering themselves as a Telco and signing up so that Plod know who to go to in order to get phone taps, etc…

Collaborative wireless network access / meshes have been tried in London before, and they are likewise somewhat illegal for the same reason.

Not that I know any of this stuff from past research into the legality of phone phreakery, no, no, of course not.

I also suspect that the Government like it this way – it constrains the ability of folk to communicate amongst themselves.

Once everything goes digital – including the radio spectrum – I shall truly fear for the ability to have unmediated communication.

We’ll have to re-institute UUCP[1] but with crypto, to get around it – which is actually rather like how Skype works, I suppose.

*However* that still does not solve the mediation of broadcast traffic, and blogs aren’t broadcast, they’re searchcast…

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[1] A peer2peer mesh network based upon telephones and modems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uucp