Secrets of the Locks
Huh. I've just learned of a photography student being harassed (sorry, that's the only word for it) by the Seattle Police Department and the Department of Homeland Security for taking pictures of the Ballard Locks.
What the hell? It's a tourist destination. Hundreds (during the summer I imagine it's thousands) of people take pictures there everyday!
Anyway, I think I found this whole trail via boingboing. A day of photography is planned as a symbolic nose-thumb to the authorities. Apparently the original story is this, and the victim of the harassment is keeping people updated on all the happenings around this incident on his own blog. Another Seattle blogger has some good comments (and relays a story from someone else about getting flipped off by George W). Apparently there will be a Stranger article about the incident this week.
This whole thing reminds me of when I was preparing to travel to Poland ten years ago. The Lonely Planet guidebook took great pains to remind people that photographing 'government installations' in communist (or rather formerly communist) countries was illegal. Such installations included powerplants, airports, and dams, in addition to what you would ordinarily think a government wouldn't want you taking pictures of: military bases, warships heading in and out of ports, etc. If memory serves, Lonely Planet suggested that the rules were only enforced if the government wanted to harass you. Others speculated that in Eastern Europe the ban was enforced so that pictures of decaying infrastructure wouldn't be circulated too widely. Anyway, the take-home message of this paragraphs is: Look what we've become.
Finally, I can't help but compare this to the prisoner abuse photographs. When is the government going to figure out that they can't abuse or harass people without the information getting out? We all have our own printing presses now, and they all talk to each other. It will continue to become harder to keep secrets.
What the hell? It's a tourist destination. Hundreds (during the summer I imagine it's thousands) of people take pictures there everyday!
Anyway, I think I found this whole trail via boingboing. A day of photography is planned as a symbolic nose-thumb to the authorities. Apparently the original story is this, and the victim of the harassment is keeping people updated on all the happenings around this incident on his own blog. Another Seattle blogger has some good comments (and relays a story from someone else about getting flipped off by George W). Apparently there will be a Stranger article about the incident this week.
This whole thing reminds me of when I was preparing to travel to Poland ten years ago. The Lonely Planet guidebook took great pains to remind people that photographing 'government installations' in communist (or rather formerly communist) countries was illegal. Such installations included powerplants, airports, and dams, in addition to what you would ordinarily think a government wouldn't want you taking pictures of: military bases, warships heading in and out of ports, etc. If memory serves, Lonely Planet suggested that the rules were only enforced if the government wanted to harass you. Others speculated that in Eastern Europe the ban was enforced so that pictures of decaying infrastructure wouldn't be circulated too widely. Anyway, the take-home message of this paragraphs is: Look what we've become.
Finally, I can't help but compare this to the prisoner abuse photographs. When is the government going to figure out that they can't abuse or harass people without the information getting out? We all have our own printing presses now, and they all talk to each other. It will continue to become harder to keep secrets.
1 Comments:
At 2:22 PM ,
Anonymous said...
Problem is the mainstream media still won't cover all of this so all of our individual printing presses will just be talking to like minded individuals. I don't want to say there isn't any hope because I think there is some. I think things like the blogger community and our impact will continue to grow.
I do think the prisoner abuse photos are an exception and even then there are plenty of people who still think everything that happened was just okay with them. Thanks to people like Seymour Hersh for writing about the administration and newspaper editors who are willing to publish photos in newspapers throughout the country.
Emily
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