AC@17:49

You'll have to bear with me as I say Brass Eye some time ago so I'm going from memory.

Brass Eye's targets were 3 fold. Uncritical media outlets who will whip anything into a moral panic. The pressure and special interest groups who will take advantage of that uncritical attitude to turn a storm in a teacup into a tornado and the well meaning (but lets say suggestible) members of the public who over react, some times hysterically.

Their method was to concoct a (just barely) plausible story about something similar to some story currently obsessing some parts of the media. The issue would have unmasked as bogus by a few minutes checking by a mildly interested hack . This would come from some non-existent charity or pressure group, which a few more minutes checking would have also revealed as nonsense.

Backing this up were the celebrity endorsements. Here the point was the "Halo" effect. X is trustworthy, they say it is so, so it must be. The point here is that part of the value of such people is that the general public trust them. There point was it was staggeringly easy to get people to endorse their rubbish with almost no one saying "Hold on, this is rubbish.”

This is the part I remember most fondly and which I mentioned. All done against a backdrop of loud intrusive music and impressive, but basically meaningless graphics.

This was usually followed up by supposed members of the general public who were reacting to the "Threat" in a fairly excessive fashion. The interviews IIRC were typically conducted in a fairly condescending fashion as befitted someone interviewing someone whose moral panic they had actually caused while they themselves can't understand what the fuss is about.

I would suggest there is no existing moral panic in the mainstream media on spam. No pressure group making outrageous claims about its harm and no celebrities acting as media spokes persons about it.

So no I don't see the similarity to Brass Eye.

Highly vocal pressure group. No.

Vocal pressure group inflaming situation. No

Over reacting members of the general public. No

Click's presentation was low key and stated it was not that easy to get control of a botnet in the first place When done they informed all victims of what had happened and what to do about it and disabled any further control of the bots. The common ground with Brass Eye and Chris Morris in particular would be the hope that people are a bit less trusting and a bit more critical.

Could it have been done without a live demo. Once again for the *target* audience I don't think so. I'm with Eugene Goodrich (earlier post) for exactly those reasons. Unless you told them it was real but used a simulation. That's lying to the audience, It fails as soon as it becomes know as the next thing you tell them will be met with "Well they faked it last time so why should we believe them this time."

"producers of a BBC documentary paid hard cash to take over a botnet."

Ever noticed the title "Fixer" on BBC documentaries in foreign and often violent countries? They help get interviews and help the film crew avoid trouble with the local "authorities," who might be just a bunch of guys with automatic weapons. Some times smiling politely does not work.

Time for Mr Green to make an appearance. America may be hated widely but there's one product of their economy which is welcome nearly everywhere.

Any sort of rogue trader / watchdog type programme has probably made initial payments to crooked tradesmen, often with criminal records.

This must come as quite a shock to you.

As for the amount. $660 US is (at tonight's closing exchange rate) is £458.33. Not quite enough for round trip to the US to do some filming but likely adequate to order a murder in somewhere like Pakistan or Afghanistan. Or 0.002291% of what Jonathan Ross was trousering prior to his little "vocal malfunction."

I'm no Media studies student, but I am a student of the media.

NB. I'm sure most people here (including our moderator) can cope with bad language. However its a presumption which can be inaccurate. I grew up reading Mad magazine, which itself was the product of an early moral panic about comics in the 1950's, when they were "Corrupting youth." I am cautious about anything that might be read by at least half a dozen total strangers, which would include anything on a bulletin board or email system. And I still had a complaint about a misplaced apostrophe.

armed robbery or child porn?

dear BBC. i am not sure how armed robberies happen or how child porn rings work - please could you demonstrate these? Ideally you'll carry out a big heist on a large bank with gold rather than notes as those seem to be the bigger events that i dont know about and you'll set up and run a multi-terabyte porn server using encrypted channels and transfer/watch lots of illegal material.

all of this should be recorded in Hi-Def because that would make better court evidence after you've broken a few more laws in this country.

@John Smith

"Er,no. Brass Eye satirised the *media* obsession with this, not the problem itself."

Let's re-read what I wrote, shall we? Or perhaps read it for the first time in your case...

"In fact, it's all rather reminiscent of the Brass Eye drugs episode where the parents of a girl supposedly susceptible to drug-taking fake their own deaths to teach her a lesson: juvenile and condescending (and, once again, real television emulates satire)."

This was nothing to do with "Getting celebrities to voice over complete b*((*cks", or "bollocks" for those people not oversensitive about their language. The satire was about the way in which people, in order to "bring attention" to a problem and to prevent bad things from happening, actually cause more harm than the most likely outcome had they not bothered. Of course, the material was meant as an exaggeration of what people do in real life - that's what satire is all about - even though Chris Morris then dabbled with lobbying members of parliament.

Whether it's the media or whether it's special interest groups (courted by the media) who behave in the way described is peripheral to this discussion. The producers of a BBC documentary paid hard cash to take over a botnet, interfered with people's computers and then said, "So that's what a botnet is, everyone." The shoe fits, somehow.