On a chilly winter day in London, a group of journalists participated in a surveillance exercise to test their ability to identify individuals trailing them. Despite their professional experience and varying degrees of security training, none succeeded in spotting their assigned followers during a planned route through the city. The exercise aimed to reveal the difficulties of recognizing surveillance, illustrating how trained professionals might overlook even obvious indicators of being followed.
Our job is to see if we can notice them and clock their identifiable features, all without their knowing we have spotted them.
You'd expect a few might have a talent for spotting small details, or to have gone undercover at some point themselves. As a profession, you'd hope reporters would be good at reading people.
None of the journalists among the group managed to successfully clock their followers, which reveals an unsettling truth about surveillance awareness.
Despite their training and experience, not a single journalist was able to identify the individuals tasked with following them.
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