Mike Johnston has a couple of good articles about the right-to-photograph-in-public issue: this one and this one.
I like Mike. He is one of the rare essayists whose stuff is almost always worth reading because he cares, knows what he's talking about, and has a personal angle.
Quote:
"The bottom line is that taking pictures in public is not a hostile act. There has been no study that I've ever been able to find that reliably links the act of photographing with terrorist activity--I'm not aware of any case where a photographer who has been detained has turned out to be a terrorist, or, the other way around, a case where a terrorist was proven to have been out taking pictures in advance of some heinous act."
Well said, Mike. (It's from the first link above.)
There are also some comments here.
Jon wrote:
I spent one night in jail and had two cameras taken away from me for 10 weeks. The attorney fee was $3000.00 and though it never went to trial, the police can arrest with out impunity and cannot be sued for false arrest.
I was shooting two models in downtown Baton Rouge, non-nude work, but there was a government building right behind the models, and someone said we were taking photos of government items, and because of the Patriot Act which we have in the US, they can arrest you on any reason they want.
No, there are rights and there are rights, but those all belong to the government.
This happened three years ago. I never shoot anywhere near anything governmental to include bridges, grain elevators and other things where it might be considered a potential terrorist target. It is not as bad now as it was three years ago, but I know full well what rights are.
Jon Barry
Update: related news.
There are many good comments to this post.
For example an excerpt by a comment from E Taylor:
Americans are supposed to be risk takers. We decided we would take risks in order to be free. We did not decide to be safe at the expense of our freedom, though that is what we seem to have agreed to today. We could save many tens of thousands of lives just by making the speed limit 25mph everywhere, but we do not because we want the freedom to travel more quickly. However, we give up our freedom to try to save the much smaller number of people who could conceivably die in a terrorist attack.
3 comments:
I spent one night in jail and had two
cameras taken away from me for 10 weeks. The attorney fee was $3000.00 and though it never went to trial, the police can arrest with out impunity and cannot be sued for false arrest.
I was shooting two models in downtown Baton Rouge, non-nude work, but there was a government building right behind the models, and someone said we were taking photos of government items, and because of the Patriot Act which we have in the US, they can arrest you on any reason they want.
No, there are rights and there are rights, but those all belong to the government.
This happened three years ago. I never shoot anywhere near anything governmental to include bridges, grain elevators and other things where it might be considered a potential terrorist target. It is not as bad now as it was three years ago, but I know full well what rights are.
Jon Barry
Sounds like trying to take photos during my first trip to the Soviet Union (back when there was one). You were looked at as a suspicious person if you even displayed a camera.
"However, we give up our freedom to try to save the much smaller number of people who could conceivably die in a terrorist attack."
We all know that the likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is so small that for all practical purposes it is non-existent. You are more likely to die from slipping on a banana peel than from a terrorist attack.
Therefore, the reason people give up their freedoms can not be because of the fear of terrorism. This is the surface reason given by the administration, and this is how people rationalise it to themselves and to each other, but it can not be the real reason.
The real reason has to do with certain laws of social psychology, i.e. behaviour of the masses, that the administration knowingly exploits.
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