For anyone who hasn’t seen it, ‘Hunted’ is a TV show in which ten folk have to go on the run and stay hidden for 28 days. The contestants are allowed to take anything they are able to carry and are granted access to a bank account containing £300. They are being pursued by a crack team of investigators who have all kinds of surveillance powers available to them (including the ability to seize computers, hack email accounts and open mail). Any contestants who can evade these ‘hunters’ for 28 days will win a share of £100,000.
Apart from being an entertaining programme, ‘Hunted’ provides a grim reminder of just how much access the state has to your personal information and all of your electronic communications. British citizens are the most observed people in the western world and the average person is caught on CCTV around seventy (yes, 70) times a day.
Two young Londoners working together –Madu Alikor and Ayo Adesina- have been making life difficult for the investigative team, so last week the hunters upped the ante. Dr Donna Youngs is described as an ‘Investigative Psychologist’ and her job is to help profile the lives of the fugitives, predicting how they might react under pressure. On last week’s show, she interviewed the wife of one of the men. As she built up her sophisticated psychological profiles, she unearthed some vital clues to help the investigative team anticipate the next moves of the two fugitives.
Madu and Ayo were good friends, said the wife, “But they argue a lot.”
Dr Youngs then reported back to the investigative team: “These men argue a lot” she said. “And this is a relationship that is under stress.”
These two men are on the run, being pursued by professional investigators who have hacked their email accounts and their phones, interviewed their families and used social media to offer financial rewards to any member of the public providing information leading to a capture. The men are tired, hungry, sleeping in ditches and dreaming about that £100,000 prize. Apart from this information and the statement from the wife that ‘they argue a lot’, Dr Youngs had nothing on which to base her remarkable observations.
Only someone who has undertaken years of professional training could examine such flimsy evidence, yet produce an insight which will surely lead the investigative team to their prey.
From what I’ve seen of Hunted, the fact that the contestants have camera crews following them everywhere would seem to be a bit of a giveaway. Jason Bourne wouldn’t put up with it, I tell you.
These dudes ought to just head for one of my threads on this blog. No-one would look there!
But they are not being hunted by the state so presumably don’t have access to CCTV, phone records etc etc and as you say have at least one camera / sound man with them, so the whole thing is unreal… it’s just a tv programme pretending to be a lot more real than it is.
They do seem have access to all that stuff, Neil; they even opened some letters sent to a contestant’s address.
This is what the Channel Four website says:
“Wherever possible the hunters utilised the same methods of surveillance employed by the state, including open source intelligence, cyber expertise and interrogating friends and family. With the stakes even higher this year, the hunters had some new tools at their fingertips. Bleks and his team were able to call in drones, dogs and helicopters if needed during the hunt and had six teams of hunters out in the field ready to be dispatched by Hunter HQ anywhere in mainland UK. As in series one, where the hunters did not legally have access to certain powers of the state, they were closely and carefully replicated – this included CCTV and ANPR (automatic number plate recognition).
An independent adjudicator was in charge of making sure the process was fair. Former Head of Covert Operations for the Met Police, Kevin O’Leary, returned for series two to help ensure information requested and gathered by the hunters reflected the information that would be available to them in real life, and within the appropriate time frame. Kevin also made sure that the team overseeing the hunters worked in isolation from the team overseeing the fugitives, and that no information could be passed from one side to the other. Kevin was the only person empowered to release information about the fugitives to the hunters and was permitted to do this only when he considered the hunters had done sufficient detective work to justify it.”
I don`t trust Kevin.
Saw this in Updates and thought, “What, not to put on women’s underwear and do Concrete and Clay?”
File under : “You know you’ve been on the Afterword too long when…”
Not watched/interested in the tv programme but interested in the statement that;
“British citizens are the most observed people in the western world and the average person is caught on CCTV around seventy (yes, 70) times a day.”
Not necessarily arguing with the assertion (which I’ve heard before) – I’m but just wondering where the evidence comes from? I can see it could apply to a big city dweller in and out of the shops, car parks, petrol stations, motorways, lifts etc. But the rest of us? And who is watching all this cctv?
Big Brother.
Having lived in 3 other countries, it does seem to be way more prevalent in the UK than anywhere else. I wonder why.
I watched a clip of this on Gogglebox. All of the hunted people were in a restaurant, the hunters found them, then they let them get away. I found myself yelling “FIX” at the telly very loudly…
They found them – brilliantly noticing the table with two cameramen and a sound man, presumably with a great f***off boom mike, standing next to it. You’ve got to hand it to these geniuses.
It sounds shit. I may well watch it.