How to take advantage of Big Brother

In the US, we worry about our civil liberties under siege from our increasingly secretive government. FISA laws being violated, phones being tapped, e-mail surveillance and the like. What we don't have (yet) is a national network of video cameras. If we did, I wonder if we would have come up with a clever idea like the band the Get Out Clause. (Not a great website, guys. They should have been more ready for the onslaught this might produce.)

Unable to afford a video crew, they set up their gear in 80 different locations (drum kit and all) around Manchester, taking advantage of Britain's 13 million closed circuit cameras. And they just played and played and played. My personal favorite is the footage from the back of the taxi. Under a Freedom of Information request, they asked for the footage from all of those cameras. Some companies complied, others didn't. But they got enough to make a pretty cool video. Snide aside: apparently FOIA requests work slightly differently on the other side of the pond than here. But perhaps that helps explain why it took nearly 9 months for the video to be released. Note that the time stamps (when legible) read March or April 2007 and the video was first posted to YouTube in December 2007. The article in the Guardian, however, did not appear until May 8, 2008. Whoever coined the phrase "news travels fast today" had no idea what they were talking about. Of course, FOIA requests in this country can take years so any bands in the US considering this tack, you'll most likely be on your 30th anniversary reunion tour before your first video sees the light of day.

ANYway...the point is, this is a pretty clever use of someone else's bandwidth, don't you think?