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I moved into a new house a few months ago and it seems that the good old TV licensing people have finally realised I exist. Having received a threatening letter from them, I went online to register (apparently, the whole process can now be done online - including having the license in purely electronic format; I’ll explain why this makes sense shortly). Good subject that I am, I’d actually tried this a couple of months ago, but they didn’t have my address on record, therefore I couldn’t.

I registered, put in my details, including my bank details to set up the direct debit and a few minutes later I got an e-mailed response saying that my application was being processed and that my license would be emailed to me within three days. First of all - what takes three days? Shouldn’t this process be, essentially, real-time - with the exception for the direct debit confirmation and let’s face it, if I don’t pay the license can be revoked fairly easily.

The e-mail arrived this morning - titled “Please open the attachment to access your TV License” and from the weird address of (the web site is actually at tvlicensing.co.uk) - why not make it consistent? Usually when I get emails with a title like that I bin them straight away, but in this case I thought I’d make an exception. I opened the email, which contained a number of remote images (thankfully Thunderbird won’t display them), as well as an HTML attachment and a button “Read Message” to click on. The basic content of the email is that my license is encrypted (good) and they need to send me another email with a link to it. This might just be me, but this whole process doesn’t make much sense.

Still being wary of the attachment itself I save it to the desktop and view the source, it’s basically a web page with Voltage secure content. That explains it all then… Voltage is a clever method of delivering encrypted email content without the need for traditional key management so works very well in consumer/public facing scenarios (it’s known as IBE - Identity Based Encryption). For some reason Thunderbird had displayed the HTML attachment inline of the message, leading to my confusion.

Clicking on the button actually sent me to a web page with a message saying that functionality in certain mail clients prevents the system from working correctly and, if that’s the case, one should forward the original email to another address, which presumably is set to autorespond with the link to the actual license.

I can see the intent with the system and it’s nice to see a public body doing something sensible with secure email, but the implementation just seems odd - a reliance on people opening attachments and clicking on links seems to contradict the advice given about phishing. Having completed the process I’m struggling to find a reason for the extra security - all I could see on-screen was my license (essentially just a number), information about what it covers and the amounts that will be paid by direct debit. The link is good for one time only, so now I’ve closed that browser tab I can’t get back to it. I’d also question what threats this was to counter - if someone were to be intercepting/monitoring my email, then all they’d need to do is follow the same link (or just forward the message to the address helpfully provided) to see my license details.

In summary - a good idea generally, but seems to be a poor implementation. The most intriguing aspect of this is that I don’t have an actual license (and since I can’t re-click on the link, can’t get even an electronic version), but that’s fine because I don’t need one. For years the TV licensing authority scared people with the notion of “detector vans” travelling round the streets finding people watching TV without a license. At last they’ve come clean and admitted that all they really have is a big database of every address in the UK, can tell which are licensed and manage the rest by exception, which must be a lot cheaper to enforce and if we’re going to have the license, I’d prefer that.