The “Break it Down” Blog

Did you know you have to pay a licensing fee when you buy a TV in the UK and that money is used to subsidize the cost of running the BBC? Yea… I didn’t either.

Well your gut reaction might be “who cares, how can they possibly police that?” As fate would have it, Chris Hunkele has pointed us at a few articles that discuss the elusive and state-secret “Magic TV detection vans” that drive around detecting unlicensed televisions when they are on.

This has come up in the UK news before, but always shot down and dismissed to redirect attention away from the effort. A citizen, under the Freedom of Information Act (aka the “You’ll Never See It Anyway” Act) has requested information about how the detection is being done, but was denied when it was felt that disclosure of how this process occurs would lessen the public’s perception of the top-secret operation that they aren’t suppose to know about anyway.

So… take that citizens. No you can’t know about our illegal human-animal generic engineering program because you’d get pissed off if you saw what we were making.

I probably would have taken a different approach on that one, but either way it’s nice to see other people in the world getting bent over the survellience-desk. God knows we need it, don’t want people watching TV… or reading… or talking on the phone in situations where we can’t keep an eye on them.

That’s dangerous.