Mass Media & Technology

Is it all honesty, now?

(October 2017)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
BA
Bail Moderator
Riaz posted:

These are all relics of the analogue era now and I'm not confident that detector vans with working detection machinery exist any more. A few years ago I encountered a goon from TVL staring through a front window with binoculars.

Which is another interesting note: If you withdrew any operative from TVL's implied permission to enter a front garden could you take a civil suit for trespass? Or more worryingly, breaching Article 8, respect for private, family life and home and correspondence.
It could be viewed that it's directed surveillance, would they need a RIPA authority?

Who is holding the contractor or TVL to account? Would make quite an interesting panorama episode!

People do exactly that, there's a number of videos if you search youtube and various TV License terms and people complaing about Capita.


I should have course point out that I think the licence fee is terrific value and I happily pay mine, but I'm just not a fan of how it's ran and I'm not sure it's in keeping with a modern BBC or that everyone can afford to pay it should be prestered if they elect not to.

(Roll on subscription iPlayer with full back catalogue aka public redux and I'm the first to sign up!)
CW
cwathen Founding member
Riaz posted:

These are all relics of the analogue era now and I'm not confident that detector vans with working detection machinery exist any more. A few years ago I encountered a goon from TVL staring through a front window with binoculars.

Which is another interesting note: If you withdrew any operative from TVL's implied permission to enter a front garden could you take a civil suit for trespass? Or more worryingly, breaching Article 8, respect for private, family life and home and correspondence.
It could be viewed that it's directed surveillance, would they need a RIPA authority?

Who is holding the contractor or TVL to account? Would make quite an interesting panorama episode!

This is where the good old 'WOIRA' - Withdrawal of Implied Right of Access - argument rears it's head. In theory the owner/sitting tenant of a property can issue a WOIRA to anyone and/or everyone to prevent uninvited visitors from accessing their property and knocking on the door, at which point any such visitors are trespassing, for which you have legal redress.


This theoretically provides protection from TVL visits. In practice, no complaints that TVL are trespassing because a WOIRA is in place will be taken seriously - even though the law is actually on the side of the householder and not TVL, and also the use of a WOIRA is deemed by the courts to be potential evidence that TV Licence evasion is taking place and so a court will gladly issue a warrant on the basis that WOIRA has been claimed by the occupier in order to overcome it. So basically TVL will eventually get to inspect any property they want to inspect, with zero evidence of any crime having been comitted beyond lack of co-operation by the householder which has no legal obligation to comply with them anyway.

It isn't just TVL/Capita which takes liberties, the entire legal system tolerates their methods and actively takes steps to help them, which again makes me believe that they have no workable detector system. If they did, they wouldn't have to sink to the depths they do to achieve convictions.
Last edited by cwathen on 25 October 2017 6:42pm - 5 times in total
:-(
A former member
How did detector vans work with blocks of flats?
:-(
A former member
I know I put this in the wrong thread Here its this Classic, Watch to the END

MW
Mike W
The trespass/WIP side is a civil matter, and the police can't and won't take action against breaches cwathen.
RI
Riaz
How did detector vans work with blocks of flats?


The antenna could tilt up to scan a 1st floor but it was difficult to scan higher floors unless there was sufficient clearance between the van and the building.

I once wrote a trigonometry question for a maths GCSE exam that involved a TV detector van and a tower block but the exam board wouldn't use it because they thought that it publicised information that TVL wouldn't be happy with making public.

There were hand-held TV detectors for hard to access areas that used two loop antennas (similar to those found on table top TVs from the 1980s) to pick up spurious emissions from the local oscillator.
MA
Markymark
Bail posted:
TV detector vans are of course entirely fictitious and always have been, they're a "marketing" gimmick to also convince people to pay up.


I do recall the Cambridgeshire SI, dB Broadcast being awarded a contract to 'service and calibrate' them, and
a colleague does recall seeing vans with the appropriate livery in dB's car park on a visit up there.

2004 apparently

http://www.bbctvlicence.com/Detector%20vans.htm
:-(
A former member
CW
cwathen Founding member
The trespass/WIP side is a civil matter, and the police can't and won't take action against breaches cwathen.

I stand very corrected. Doesn't however alter that ground for a civil claim exists which should be open and shut in favour of the applicant, but it isn't. Instead it's treated as evidence that the complainant has committed a crime.
MW
Mike W
It's an interesting debate, and I do find it very interesting that TVL can seemingly swear out a warrant and a JP will just grant it, based on a hunch - having had to ask for a warrant a few times before the level of detail can be really OTT, others it is as simple as 'Officer, is the information contained within the application true to the best of your knowledge and belief?' after they've signed it!
DA
davidhorman
'Officer, is the information contained within the application true to the best of your knowledge and belief?' after they've signed it!


"Nope! Sucker! Ha ha ha ha ha! "

That's how I like to think the justice system works, anyway.

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