In the streetlight effect, a drunk searches for his keys underneath a street light even though he lost them in a dark park. Asked why, he explains that the light is better under the street lamp.
I’m wondering if our government’s harassment of photographers is an example of this effect. In the wake of the Marathon bombing here in Boston, the FBI recommends looking for people making “discreet use of cameras” (source). The man with a camera has been an irresistible target for law enforcement personnel since 9/11. For example, see
- this story about a guy hassled for taking pictures of a generic office building
- this nytimes blog entry about how the chiefs had to write up some new policies to rein in gung-ho officers
- Wikipedia
- The Photographer’s Right (by a real live lawyer)
- Wikipedia article on plane spotters arrested in Greece
We could debate the relative merits of security for government workers versus First Amendment, but maybe it is worth stepping back and asking a few questions:
- given that the useful life of a building may be 50 to 100 years, would it not be a bad design feature for the security to be compromised in the event that someone took a picture of it?
- to what extent have terrorists made use of cameras?
With a worldwide Internet, many photo-posting sites are in countries whose freedom of press laws would prevent the U.S. government from order a take-down of a photo of a U.S. government building. So if at any time in a 50-100-year period if a photo is taken that would facilitate an attack, the photo will be permanently available. Would it not then be better to create U.S. government facilities whose security does not depend on them never being photographed? (example: a suburban campus with a quarter-mile-wide border of grass, a tall fence around the interior, some guarded gates, and one more fence around the quarter-mile-wide grass border)
Which terrorist attacks were accomplished with the aid of pre-attack photography? The Tsarnaev brothers had just one gun, a 9mm pistol. They were on and off Welfare. It seems unlikely that they owned an extensive Canon EOS or Nikon DSLR system. Has there been any suggestion that they went to the bombing locations prior to the day of the Marathon and took photos? If so, with what kind of camera? The Wikipedia article on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing does not say anything about Ramzi Yousef having a camera. His mentor, Omar Abdel Rahman, was blind (i.e., not a very likely photographer).
If the answer to the latter question is “Hardly any” then I would submit that we are seeing the streetlight effect.
Our law enforcement services spent a lot of time with Ramzi Yousef (Wikipedia describes a 72-hour detention and interrogation) and failed to discover any terrorist intent. Lots of government bureaucrats and law enforcement officials spent time with the Tsarnaev brothers, e.g., during the process by which they were granted citizenship and/or permanent residency, following the older brother’s arrest for domestic violence, following the Russian government’s tip that the older brother was a terrorist, and presumably during various interviews regarding their eligibility to collect welfare. At no time were any dark mental thoughts uncovered.
Given the difficulty of using conversation to see into another person’s private thoughts, especially when that other person is not a native speaker of English, is it fair to say that looking for terrorist thoughts inside the heads of potential terrorists is like looking for one’s keys in the dark park?
What’s under the streetlight then? A middle-aged tourist in a 4XL red parrot-print Hawaiian shirt is shouldering a $2000 digital SLR with a $2000 telephoto zoom lens attached. A cumbersome camera bag hangs from the other shoulder, filled with additional lenses. It is high noon on a weekday. The tourist raises the monster camera to his eye. Instead of trying to find an interpreter to talk to one of the non-English speakers from a violence-plagued part of the world to whom we have recently granted political asylum, let’s hassle the fat tourist and demand to know what he is doing with his $10,000 camera system.
What do readers think? Has a Canon 5D or Nikon D600 been a useful tool for terrorists? If not, why does carrying one get our government security apparatus so excited?
[Update: On about the same day that I wrote the above posting on our government security forces occupying themselves with hassling tourists and camera buffs, a story broke about how Chinese hackers had downloaded the designs for America’s newest and fanciest military hardware, including the F-35 fighter jet (USA Today). The only silver lining in that story is that they also got the design for the V-22 Osprey so maybe they will bankrupt themselves before they can attack us (the Osprey was initially budgeted at $2.5 billion and is now on track to cost something like $50 billion; TIME says it costs $83,256/hour to fly, which is more than a C-5 cargo plane that holds as much as a Boeing 747, but half the $163,485 that it costs to fly President Obama on his B747; a former Marine Corps officer dedicates a whole page to the shortcomings of the Osprey)). Apparently finding a guy in Hawaiian shirt with a Canon L lens is a lot easier than keeping the Chinese from outsmarting us.]
Maybe the answer is simpler. Maybe Hollywood has conditioned people to think “sneaky stuff going on” whenever they see a long lens. Just think of all the portrayals of spys/cops/bad guys conducting surveillance usually with an slr/telephoto combo in the movies or on tv.
Agreed completely, and I would like to propose that there may also be an aspect of authoritarian entitlement. Cameras interrogate and report with uniformity and that can be threatening to officers who have been trained that it is their sole right.
The man with the $10,000 system is almost certainly not a terrorist, but he might be taking pictures of me or my friends, and I need to protect my job and show him that no one messes with the police.
Boston police seem jumpier than most. Several years ago (but after 9/11) I was in Logan airport, traveling with my family. We had a fair amount of baggage and stuff to check in, and I figured snapping a photo of it would be a quick way to inventory it all. I was immediately set upon by two airport security guards, ready to confiscate my camera (or worse). I’m sure if I’d been traveling alone, I would have lost the camera at a minimum.
The Star Simpson fiasco (ultimately costing the young woman her enrollment at MIT) and the Aqua Teen Hunger force signs are other examples. It’s pretty pathetic when officials can’t tell battery powered LEDs apart from explosives.
It’s all about making sure the peasants know who’s boss–the “terrorism” bit is just an excuse. The original Soviet Union used to do the same thing, and back in the 1980s people in the US would make fun of their “no photography” rules.
Years ago I was on a business trip in Detroit, and I visited Windsor. Took video of the cross-boarder tunnel for my wife to see, left the camera (point and shoot digital) on the seat, turned on. On the way back into the US, TSA agent demanded to see my camera, made me delete pictures of the “sensitive areas”. Useless security theater, since I’m enough of a computer geek that undeleting pictures later is trivial-and if I had ill intent, there are any number of methods that would not have aroused the suspicions of the TSA, like putting the camera in the glove box while in line.
Here’s an interesting case:
Amtrak, our national passenger railroad, runs a yearly photo contest for on the subject of their trains. A photographer gets arrested by Amtrak Police over the matter. It turns out that its perfectly legal to take pictures of Amtrak trains, as long as you are on a location where there is safe access for the public, and the photographer violated no law in taking pictures. The photographer sued Amtrak and was awarded a sum in the five figures. Read about it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/nyregion/28about.html
As they say, unbelievable but true.
This is all going to go away quickly after another camera generation or two when they start coming with 4G chipsets by default and just upload the images or video directly to The Cloud (or what 50s-90s IT trevs would call a server).
Very simple. Terrorists, while they do exist and are a genuine serious threat, are actually exceedingly few and far between. There also very difficult to identify before they actually attack. But for reasons I need not elaborate, our Leaders find it useful to have a terrified public believe that terrorists are lurking under every bed, and can be readily identified because they “act strange.” (Our current Leaders are merely following in the footsteps of their predecessors who built highly successful careers countering the threat of communists who similarly lurked under every bed; their own predecessors built their careers fighting the threat of ubiquitous anarchists. The United States has been One Nation Under Fear for a century.)
Because of the paranoia our Leaders find useful to encourage, police officers as well as rent-a-cops feel compelled to believe they are on the front lines of the Global War on Terror. They also feel the War gives them license (or even an obligation) to harass anyone they see who “acts strange.”
Photographers, who generally don’t threaten anyone, are exceedingly common. But the very same people who see themselves as the vanguard soldiers in the War on Terror tend to regard photographers as a threat. That’s perhaps understandable, because people armed with cameras may document embarrassing things. So in the absence of terrorists, they go after photographers in an effort to feel like they’re Doing Something to protect the Homeland. They’re just doing what our Leaders encourage them to do. If it chills legitimate activities, that’s entirely fine because it promotes the Fear that our Leaders find exceedingly useful.
That said, I have yet to be harassed by police officers for the offense of photography. But I have been accosted by rent-a-cops in Downtown Los Angeles who were intent on protecting their territory from the threat of photography. But I’ve only once had one insist that I’m violating the Patriot Act; and he backed off when I asked him what specific section of the Patriot Act I’m violating so I could go look it up. In all other cases, they were enforcing an edict from “management” that taking pictures of their buildings required a permit. Or else they claimed that photography was “illegal” (and they backed off when I asked what specific law that might be).
I’ve also had a few interesting encounters with people who aren’t police or rent-a-cops. They see me peering through my viewfinder with no obvious family members (the only legitimate reason to take pictures) in sight as subjects. And following official directions to challenge anyone they consider “acting strange,” they demand to know what I’m photographing. I have so far been successful at defusing this situation by pretending that they’re interested in learning about photography. I explain the composition I’m trying for, and invite them to peer through the viewfinder to see it. That seems to bore them enough to convince them that I’m not collecting information for a terrorist plot involving the subject. I think that’s the best approach, far better than showing my actual annoyance.
But I do think that John Ashcroft, in bullying Congress to approve a lengthy compendium of law enforcement wish lists without debate, fully intended the USA-Patriot Act to have a generalized chilling effect that goes well beyond anything actually contained in the legislation. Since few people (including the members of Congress who voted for it to show they were “tough on terrorism”) really know what the Act contains, police and rent-a-cops enjoy a license to use it as justification for prohibiting perfectly legal things that they don’t like. Photography is just an easy target that lets people feel they’re Doing Something.