The contract of advertising agency Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy with the Metropolitan Police Service expires at the end of March.
They are being replaced by Gordon Brown's favourite ad agency Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, who gave him "Design services" during his Labour party leadership non-election "coronation" campaign.
ABV BBDO have also been awarded the lucrative Home Office ID Cards propaganda account.
Presumably Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy are at least partly to blame for the current Metropolitan Police Service anti-terrorism advertising campaign launched today.
This campaign includes this false and misleading poster, which claims a non existent link between public CCTV and protection against terrorist bombs:
"A bomb won't go off here because weeks before a shopper reported someone studying the CCTV cameras"
There is no evidence that any Islamic extremist or Irish terrorists or Animal Rights extremists or neo-Nazi extremists, who have exploded, or tried to explode bombs, or set off incendiary devices, have been deterred from doing so by the presence of CCTV cameras. Some may have been tracked down partially through the help of CCTV footage, after their attacks or attempted attacks, but that is not what this poster is implying.
There is no evidence that any of them who have actually had access to any explosives, have ever been caught in the act of "terrorist reconnaissance" of CCTV cameras, neither by members of the public (which is what this poster misleadingly claims), nor by regular Police street patrols, nor even by any covert surveillance of known suspects.
Since you do not need any equipment to check out where public CCTV cameras are, just your eyes and your memory, it is unlikely that any real terrorism or criminal reconnaissance of CCTV camera systems will ever be detected in the way that this poster implies.
This poster is just Climate of Fear propaganda, and it will no doubt be used to justify the harassment of photographers taking photos, perfectly legally in public places, which have been infested with CCTV spy cameras, something for which there is plenty of evidence for.
See Matt Wardman's Official Harassment of Photographers in the UK: I have a Little List
We are reporting this misleading poster to the Advertising Standards Authority, and urge you all to do the same.
UPDATE:
David Mery rightly points out that this re-run of previous Climate of Fear campaigns is likely to lead to lots of False Positive denunciations of innocent people
Police calls for a climate of fear
Considering how bad trained police officers are at spotting terrorists, asking untrained people to attempt to do the same will end up creating more suspicion of anyone behaving a bit differently. This will obviously target those who have different customs and those who are afflicted by some illness, fuelling further discrimination. These campaigns also focus on common objects, recently photographers have been particularly targeted. Looking at our environment, be it buildings or CCTV surrounding us, - hostile reconnaissance as it is called by the police - is a cause for arrest but so far has not been a cause for any conviction.
UPDATE: 25th March 2009
The Advertising Standards Authority has decided to pass on the complaint about this poster to the Independent Advertising Standards Council for their consideration,
"See, look. We do so too need CCTV. Your street would have exploded long since otherwise."
Leave your bin in that state round our way and it won't be emptied and you'll be fined. Thick terrists.
I'm also surprised that the cctv cameras didn't spot the dodgy fellow looking at them. Are they actually real functioning cameras with IR and supa zoom keeping us safe from all manner of nasties, or are they cheap plastic decoys like those ducks that hunters use.
@ Paul - surely it is just as likely that people with wheelie bins overflowing with rubbish will be falsely denounced as "terrorists", by some officious jobsworth, as a result of this Climate of Fear campaign ?
@ Paul - surely it is just as likely that people with overflowing rubbish wheelie bins will be denounced as "terrorists" by some officious jobsworth, as a result of this Climate of Fear campaign ?
Or "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". If they allow the whole street to see the contents of their bin, ipso facto they cannot be terrorists.
I have no problem about them [who ever is out there] reading my mail or my comments. SIS are up their own backsides ladies and gentlemen? You have nothing to fear as their bloody useless at the real stuff? Just like all New Labour establishments all charts and targets? Wouldn't know a terrorist from a cleaner and as for organised crime its all around them in the City? Just lift the crapheads directors in all these failed banks? Laundering money would almost dissapear. TS
Is this type of official ad covered by the Advertising Standards Authority?
@ Will - the Metropolitan Police Service has "form" for misleading advertising, which has been dealt with by the Advertising Standards Authority e.g.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article4265475.ece
They are also runnin this ad on Local Radio. I heard it on HEARt and nearly puked
Has anyone else see the large posters in London that exlaim: 'Anything you do say may be given in evidence' .... for no apparent reason. As if we are all criminals just walking around. Turned my stomach this morning.
K
@ Kiershen - it is called "The Policing Pledge"
http://campaigns.direct.gov.uk/policingpledge/
Yes, the style is deliberately that of authoritarian WW2 / George Orwell era propaganda posters.
Some advertising "creative" has ripped off the idea from the recent revival of the vintage Keep Calm and Carry On poster,
How about a return to Sir Robert Peel's Policing Principles instead ?
The Advertising Standards Authority has decided to pass on the complaint about this poster to the Independent Advertising Standards Council for their consideration,
Roll your own parodies here:
http://jamesholden.net/billboard/
@ James - perhaps you were lucky.
The "Crowded Places" terrorist advice brochures published by the National Counter Terrorism Security Office
http://www.nactso.gov.uk/crowdedplaces.php
define "Hostile Reconnaissance to include:
However, if you run around with all that sort of equipment , whilst wearing a fluorescent yellow or orange high visibility vest or jacket, then you will probably become "invisible".
Cory Doctorow has collected quite a few mash ups of these wretched posters at boingboing.net
Remixes of the paranoid London police "anti-terror"/suspect your neighbours posters
http://www.flickr.com/photos/op_timus/3404507622/
Today I am giving serious thought to ringing the anti terror hotline to dob in a tool which circumvents the publics ability to act upon this excellent posters guidelines, and represents a real threat to the guilty (until proven innocent) law abiding folk.
The tool in question is arguably useful, yet invasive.
It could be easily used to "elicit information likely to be of use to a person in preparation for an act of terrorism" and thus should be removed from the privileged useage of the masses, because of a tiny minority that may abuse the freedom (which they wish to destroy)that it provides. I hope the minority government will remove the said freedom this tool allows, in order to offer us the security blanket that no-one but ourselves can infact provide. We can always fight for the right to be once again bestowed with a taken for granted, previously existing freedom afterall.
The tool is the internet software "Google Street View", which allows private scrutiny of CCTV, or even yourself at a Starbucks if you've been extraordinarily rendered into being with no morals.
No CCTV position information was actually elicited in the making of this suggestion, nor any coffee consumed. The freedom to have indulged in both is simply too much to handle and like a hot depleted uranium potato, I wish to juggle it back, to the hands that first cast it, as I declare that I shall conduct myself responsibly and thus don't require their nanny nurturing, or their suggestion I adopt a Stasi like attitude to my fellow man.
You could fine the poster boy, for the overflowing bin contents though, but then only after a court conviction by a jury of peers, as all fines prior to, are in contravention of our already very well written and not in need of replacing constitution. Not that the government seem to be aware of that, which they swore to uphold, to take office, which renders them...hmmm.... reportable rubbish!
I was wondering when Bin Laden would show up!
I have complained to the ASA and The Press Bureau at New Scotland Yard about these disgusting adverts. I also spoke to the Home Office who say it is nothing to do with them. It was New Scotland Yard who instigated it.
@ Andy - so much for a nationally coordinated anti-terrorism propaganda campaign
Are we to believe that neither of the relevant Home Office ministers (Vernon Coaker and Lord West of Spithead), nor any of their counter terrorism / communities civil servants bothered to liaise with ACPO and the Metropolitan Police Service and the other Police forces currently running this propaganda campaign up and down the country ?
If not, then why not ?
It hardly seems credible that nobody in the Home Office was informed about this campaign, or was not shown a preview of these posters beforehand.
It makes me sick! I am so sick and tired of being watched at every turn! A few decades ago I thought they might help but clearly they have not. So they increase the amount and we pay for it. So we pay to spy on ourselves and see nothing but fear and paranoia drummed into us by a state who are run and controlled by the real terrorists of our time. Stand up for yourselves. Complain, write your local gov and maybe we might regain some level of democracy again!
Otherwise they'll just disappear anyone who posted on here and carry on churning out their little plastic ploicemen to put a hurt on us all!