"Are photographers really a threat?"

>>> I disagree with Brad's post.

 

Based on what? Do you have some personal experience to share?

Why put those professions in quotes, Ted? Is that different than being in "gallery curating" or the "photography business?" The implication - that somehow these are not legitimate professions, and that most cops are - when you're not looking - hoping to get away with beating people up... is completely spurious. Ask cops, yourself: they couldn't be happier to have helicopter footage or dash cam records of exactly how insane a lot of the people they have to deal with actually are (or how drunk, or how violent, or how abusive, or what bad actors they are, etc). Cops like the ones that overeacted to the car full of guys in Philadelphia the other day in the wake of an officer being shot? They were recorded being - some of them - jackasses, and are losing their jobs, facing prosecution. The vast majority of people in that line of work WANT clowns like that, who erode public trust, out of the profession.

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Cops don't "go after photographers to keep in practice." That sort of shrill "Fight The Power" blather isn't any more useful than saying that people with long hair who gather on the streets are all, always, anxious to destroy the first Starbucks they see, and keep in practice by attending soccer hooligan events and trashing McDonalds franchises. Painting everyone who puts it on the line to deal with ugly domestic violence cases, burning cars on the highway, actual real-live killer bad guys, drunk drivers and the rest as drama queens looking for an opportunity for cheap heroism isn't any different than saying that essentially all street photographers are pedophiles.

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Your local beat cop (the one who would show up if you called because someone was breaking into your house) can't invoke the Patriot Act, and he knows it. But he's still the primary guy responsible for showing up first when something bad happens. There's a reason so many of them died in NY in 2001, and it wasn't because they were hoping no one would be photographing them running into giant, flaming, fatally damaged buildings full of office workers. When was the last time you actually sat down and had a beer with a hard working cop? You need to. Then ask him about his jurisdiction's ride-along program. Take them up on it for a couple of Friday nights, and then revisit this topic. The boogeymen with badges that are so often dreamt up in convesations like this, as rhetorical devices, are very much the exception, not the rule.

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The secuity guard discussed in the original post, above, wasn't trying to act the hero. He probably actually did think that a video crew should not have been operating in Union Station without the facility's security people knowing about it - and no doubt he's been loudly corrected by now, several times.

<i>I guess you could even use Google Earth as a diy flight simulator.</i>

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You don't need to do it yourself. Just open the Tools menu and select "Enter Flight Simulator."

For the love of God Matt, give it a rest. Nobody doubts that terrorists are real. But the threat posed by photographers is entirely imaginary, and yes, believe it or not, governments do use fear about these sorts of things as a mechanism of control. It's like the "terrorist hot line" that NYC set up that boasted of 20,000 tips called in in its first two years of operation. What they didn't boast about was the number of terrorists arrested as a result: zero.

 

On second thought, I take it back. If denying that terrorists are real will, as you claim, end my conversation with you then great: terrorists are not real.

Maybe you're not actually reading, Mark, where I mention that I don't think that restricting photographers is a meaningful or appropriate protection against bad guys? But I do find, all too often, that some people who argue against putting such restrictions in place somehow also manage to trot out breathless aphorisms about how the government is responsible for imaginary fears as part of their social control agenda, blah blah blah. Rather than simply argue the point based on reason - and that's all it takes - out come the conspiracy theories. Talk about needing to give it a rest.

 

You don't need to lean on that particular tin-foil-hat-style crutch to make valid points about the fruitlessness of keeping photographers from shooting in public. But when you DO attach such absurd sentiments to the argument, it actually devalues the point. The irony of using paranoid sentiments about the government creating imaginary threats as part of a lecture about how foolish people are acting paranoid about photographers is pretty great, though. At least in terms of entertainment value.

Matt, some of the "law enforcement" and "security officials" are actually rent-a-cops, low-paid imitations of legitimate police officers. They're often the most aggressive "enforcers" of (nonexistent) restrictions on photography within the turf they're protecting.

The whole point is not that the governments of the world are actually being successful about combating terrorism. The whole point is that they are seen to be doing something to combat terrorism.

 

I will liken this to Margaret Thatcher in the UK who blamed all of societies ills on an unidentifiable and defenceless group called "the unemployed" (most of whom her government's policies helped to become unemployed). Later John Major's government realised that "the unemployed" had become a tired argument that nobody believed any more so he blamed societies ills on "single mothers". My dad calls this policy: "papering over the cracks".

 

At this point in time, most people have mobile telephones. Most mobile telephones have a video and photography facility. It's possible to take photos with a mobile phone under the pretext of making a phonecall. It's possible to set the phone down on a bench while sitting and reading a newspaper, thus videoing the target installation to get a good recording of security procedures. Heck - you don't even have to be facing it - you could just use the reflection in a car door or a shop window - that's how I used to check if I was being followed when I was working in the Baltics.

 

The whole point is that however useless the policy, the government feels more powerful in people's eyes if it is to be seen to be doing something. This is really a thinly-veiled disguise over what they're really doing. What they're really doing is introducing an element of fear into society. When people are afraid of being snatched off the streets and incarcerated without trial for a couple of months (currently the case in the UK) and robustly interrogated then they will fear their own shadows and won't want to step outside their front doors. This makes the government's life easier as it keeps the honest people off the streets and out of what's left they can pick and choose who the real terrorists are.

Most rent-a-cops, Ted, are working on private property. That is a <i>completely</i> different situation, since the owner of that property is the one with the rights, not the photographer. Many people would be surprised how often they're actually on private property while carrying on with their street photography.

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To the extent that an <i>actually</i> public space is being guarded by a subcontractor that's done a bad job of teaching its staff the salient laws/rules - then they need to be straightened out, obviously. I live in the DC area... land of heavily policed property, both public (city, county, state, and federal) and private. I don't recall the last time I saw anyone other than actual for-real officers tending to public property.

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From where I'm sitting, I'm within a mile or so in every direction of turf under the protection of city cops, county cops, state troopers, park police, metro system/transit police, federal guards at the gates of various agencies, miltary police from every branch, the Secret Service, the TSA, and a huge patchwork of others. Private shopping plazas, malls, schools, and countless others employ private firms (always the lowest bidder! - grrr!), and no question that the latter is far sketchier than the former when it comes to a consistent, informed, and polite way of dealing with the public on all matters - including photography. The pros are always more... pro about it. You can spot it a mile away.

As I said, I am more and more thinking that some of the participants on this thread are a threat. To what, I'm not exactly sure, but definitely a threat.

 

Humor and politeness not only work better with overenthusiastic cops, but also with overenthusiastic people of all kinds.

 

What is the point when almost every cellphone or "handy" is also a camera, and when I can download photos of individual street addresses on Google? Hey, better shut of Google too.

I used to work as a govt contactor inside the regional HQ of one the main Fed Govt agencies. Up till 9-11, security concerns were mainly relaxed and mostly re-active. But 9-11 was DEFINITELY the wake-up call, as far as US Fed Govt was concerned. Although it took a while to get the "giant" awakened, I witnessed "security awareness conciousness" to become a part of the daily work life of federal employees at that site. This dynamic slowly expanded, year by year, to include Facility Security, Employee Security, IT and Computer Security, Contractor Security, etc, etc, etc.

 

You need to understand that at any govt site, they hold mandatory, yearly, CBT based security training in all these areas. Employees are required by the new environment to take these, absorb them, and then "pass" the "canned" tests, to get little certificates that get placed in the employee folders.

 

So, little wonder then, when they look out their office window, and see (from a distance of 50 yards or more), a "photographer taking pictures", they respond, like Pavlov's dogs, to the endoctrination they have rcvd, and they contact authorities - "there's a strange looking guy out there taking pictures of our site! He might be a terrorist, so I'm just letting you know!".

 

And the security people feel obligated to check out every report, true or false, innocent or malovelent. Then they get to do their little reports and make an entry in their daily logs, and write it up in their weekly status reports.

 

That, in a nutshell, is pretty much the reality if you plan on taking pictures anywhere near Federal Govt Buildings in the good old USA. Probably true for State Govt buildings as well.

One of the things that annoys me is not that the government tries to fulfill its role in keeping us safe. It's that they do so in completely the wrong way.

 

In the old days Britain would send a few warships to a naughty country and sink all the ships in the harbours, demolish all the area around the docks and then sack the capital city. That would keep the riff-raff in check for quite a few years. When they got uppety we'd go and do it again. It worked.

 

These days the villains have better weapons and more of them so the old ways don't work any more. The way that will work but which will take time is to remove the reasons these people have to attack us. That does not mean capitulating.

 

The current wave of terrorism is nothing to do with Islam. Islam is the excuse the terror masters use in order to recruit the weak-willed to do their bidding. What the terror masters want is simply to become boss; to have what we have in the west and to have control over their lives and of those of others.

 

Beating that is all about winning hearts and minds and bringing up the standard of living in other countries. It is not about aid. It is about education and encouragement.

 

The emphasis on chasing people who act suspiciously or who take photos seems to me to be painting over the paper over the crack! Having said that, it is something we will have to endure while the current wave of terrorists continues and until we have won the hearts and minds of the rest of the world.

 

With luck and a fair wind, if travelling photographers can produce photos of the misery and suffering in the rest of the world and bring it to the attention of the public then public pressure might get more change underway. I don't mean pretty National Geographic photos that make poverty, misery and disease look cute. I mean photos that show the brutal reality of the situation.

If the fear of photographs as being part of a terror plot was founded then, GOOGLE maps and STREET VIEW would not have been allowed.

 

For some ill intentioned person who wanted to plan anything (including a house robbery) GOOGLE maps and street view is much more useful than any pictures taken by any photographer.

 

But, by spreading FEAR any form of gov. assumes more control over its people and the subsequent stripping of the people's right, literally or de-facto.

 

Truth is, there is an implied 'license' now for police and sec. officers to harass people that seem 'suspicious' to them. While more experienced law enf. officers and agents know better (and have real criminals to fight), many of them jump at the chance of using their inherent power of coercion and the majority of their victims will not prosecute or even file complaints.

 

As it has been aptly put by B. Franklin those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither. (I paraphrase).

Excellent article. It's a pleasant relief to see some common sense being brought to this previously absurd affair.

"When Hitler attacked the Jews ﾅ I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant churchﾗand there was nobody left to be concerned. " Martin Niemöller

 

Where will the oppression go next?

I saw a bumper sticker in Texas that pretty much sums it up; "We're making Enemies Faster Then We Can Kill Them".

 

We are witnessing the decline of the West, or at least it's start.

Photographers aren't the problem. If you need visual information, a cell phone camera linked to a computer to record the images immediately is far more unobtrusive - as are Google Earth and Google Street View.