Is government harassment of photographers an example of streetlight effect?
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.]
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where, a maximum country population of 10 million is suggested (otherwise the leaders become too remote from the people and it is impossible for an average citizen to have any influence on the government; consider the situation of someone in Hawaii or California who wants to talk to the bureaucrats in charge, a 6- or 11-hour airline journey away). In theory we could try to capture some of the Danish magic by turning federal power over to the 50 states, but in practice the federal government has been taking programs and power away from the states for 100+ years.
(Canon equivalent has inferior dynamic range and sensor score on DxOMark)
(no Canon equivalent lens; Sigma 35/1.4 is a good lens but expensive and heavy)