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Watching You Watching Us
BBC to public: "It's impossible to hide; It's all in the database."
This is the latest, chilling advertisement from the BBC's TV Licensing wing warning viewers that they cannot escape the tax-funded broadcaster's scrutiny.
It's an absolutely appalling vision, worthy, as Eamonn Butler writes in the Times, of the Stasi or Gestapo. Look at the message - and aerial view of a circuit board, designed to look like a city with a helicopter hovering above; a sinister voiceover; the smug claim that all our information is online and at the BBC's fingertips.
The lovable "Auntie Beeb", who seems more like Big Brother's wicked sister has previous in this kind of campaign. A few years ago, it broadcast a series of similarly threatening advertisements depicting faceless thugs stamping along driveways, calling on the homes of viewers who fail to buy TV licenses.
Who else in the world would put up with this abuse of information technology? What other democratic western nation allows its state broadcaster to issue such vile threats to its citizens? And why? The BBC has an entire department dedicated to coming up with bovver-boy tactics such as this film: It's time it was disbanded.
