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Prosecuted for taking photographs Via the indispensable Bishop Hill blog, is this scary Henry Porter article about how many Britons, including professional photographers, are being arrested for taking photos of supposedly “off-limits” buildings. I also notice in the article that yet another Tory MP has been arrested.
The police seem to be developing quite a taste for arresting MPs on dubious charges these days. But at least some judges are beginning to tighten the screws on coppers demanding to arrest or search people in “high profile” cases. But what about the rest of us plebs?
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Yes this is a very worrying trend. It was not so long ago that we in the UK used to think how repressive other countries were for doing this very thing (remember the aero spotters in Greece a few years back?) Makes me proud to live in the land of the free – ha ha.
What’s so very worrying is how bullying officialdom gets away with it nowadays. There have always been jacks-in-office willing to push people around and make up “the rules” as they went along, but the governmentalist culture now excuses and rewards such thugs, and the public have come to expect it. Resistence is deemed futile.
BTW, Henry’s article has some errors. You need to take even the civil libertarians’ description of official powers with a pinch of salt now, so far have expectations changed.
Yes, it is a disturbing and depressing trend. But what really rubs salt into the wound is that it even if it was justified it would be completely ineffective “security theatre”. There is no way they can stop some one with a disguised miniature camera wandering around buildings and landmarks – or stop someone with a telephoto lens taking photos from a distance.
As someone who wanders around cities and around the countryside and takes lots of photographs of things like signs, shop windows, bridges, and container ports, I am seeing more of this kind of thing. I have never been asked or told not to take a photograph by a police officer, but I do get it from such people as security guards and owners of shops and market stalls who believe that they have the right to tell me what I can and cannot photograph. I am obviously subject to the law of tresspass, so the owners of private property are perfectly within their rights to ask me not to take photographs while on their premises, and to exclude me from the premises if I do not agree to this, but I am perfectly within my rights to take photographs of their property from a public place, which seems less and less understood.
I think the bullying tactics of police and the law has rather emboldened people in other positions of authority and pseudo-authority. The fact that I am unlikely to gain much sympathy from the police and the law if I complain about such infringements of my rights gives them de facto power. And this is not a good trend.
They opened a brand new Mall in the centre of Bristol, called the Cabot Circus at the end of last year(brilliant timing! Two of the units have already closed) and the wife went to have a look at lt, and took our new camera.
Yes you guessed, she was accosted by a plastic Plod.
Ah but a bit of guile can come in useful.
She carries an old Press Card of mine in her wallet
Flashed it at the PP and said that she was on assignment, and on a very tight deadline, now kindly get out of my way.
And he did!
Here’s security guru Bruce Schneier on why this sort of thing is not merely annoying, but stupid:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-221.html
The sort of thing described, where some jamoke or other thinks that a person shouldn’t be taking pictures, calle the police, and the police proceed to harass and intimidate the picture-taker, demonstrates quite clearly that the police (not only in the UK) often no longer see their work as containing the vital element of protecting the rights of the innocent and law-abiding. Their interest is solely in finding and catching lawbreakers, and they now see every person that they come into contact with, not as a citizen, but as a suspect. In the UK at least, the plethora of umbrella laws (I remember the original ‘sus’, who would ever have thought to see it back, and 100 times worse to boot?) mean that a police officer can now detain any person at any time for any reason or no reason. Don’t be surprised when they do exactly that. It is what they are incentivized to do.
llater,
llamas
Even for Americans this is frightening because our lawmakers (lawgivers?) are especially anglophilic when it comes to restrictive legislation. I was in London in ’93 and was shocked to see a street surveillance camera. The good old days, eh? Where was the photo of your staffer firing the M-16 taken?
eng,
’93 was just the beginning of our surveillance culture. You wouldn’t recognise it now.
I spent a lot of time on the streets of Westminster in the ’92 election, and always noted cameras because even then I worried about privacy. There were actually very few then, and they generally served a directly identifiable purpose in relation to a specific building or development. Few covered public spaces.
The real take-off was in the late 90s when we got the City “ring of steel” (responding to the very last IRA bombs) as a prototype of fully fortified and surveilled zones, local authorities started street surveillance schemes, and public transport began to use it.
There are currently 127 cameras in Regents Park tube station alone. The Metropolitan Police has designs on linking and standardising what it estimates are 500,000 already existing cameras in the control of public authorities in London – for the notional purpose of Olympic security in 2021.
/2012 of course
Mrs Paleologos was subject to “hostile reconnaissance” when policing in the West End; she had a woman photographing every detail of her uniform and badge numbers outside a likely target.
She ended up deciding to just leave it (after all, perhaps people are just “policespotters”), but when you have an angry youth with, er, a beard taking snaps of driveways into government buildings, you can kind of see the point.
Guy
‘…standardising what it estimates are 500,000 already existing cameras …’
My God, are you serious ????!!!!!!!
A HALF A MILLION cameras ????? !!!!!!!
in O N E damn city ????? !!!!!
For WHAT ?????
And, at a rate of 50 cameras per monitor that’s
10 THOUSAND monitors.
Simple question – who the Hell is sitting on their asses and WATCHING these monitors, how DAMN much does it cost to pay them and WHAT IN THE HELL is
BEING ACCOMPLISHED ??????????
Not questions being aimed at you Guy, specifically, but
WHERE DOES IT END ??
A camera in everyone’s left nostril and miniature monitor in front of everyone’s left eye so that we can all spy on each other !!!!!!!!!
Sound like it’s time for slingshots and wire cutters.
Again, at what point do people FINALLY say
E N O U G H and start hanging the bastards that implement this shit.