Just Because I’m Taking Photos Does Not Make Me A Terrorist

One Nation Under CCTV 2
A good piece on the BBC News website regarding the “guilty until proven innocent” attitude that seems to be taken more and more with regard to taking photos in public. (Via Boing Boing)
Austin Mitchell MP is also leading the charge against this nonsense.
And obviously, those CCTV cameras are always on you!


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2 responses to “Just Because I’m Taking Photos Does Not Make Me A Terrorist”

  1. Tony avatar
    Tony

    So it’s not just my personal paranoia.
    I’ve been out with my camera quite a bit over the past few days and have, on a few occasions, chickened out of capturing a nice scene because there were some young children around. Around as in not even in the shot, but I was still too worried about what their parents might think, to even take my camera out of my bag.
    No-one would want a return to the days when potential abuse of children was overlooked or brushed under the carpet, but surely there must be a safe centre-ground.

  2. Adam Bowie avatar

    I probably should have included a link to this from a week or so ago.
    It does seem that there’s another story about some innocent photographer getting stopped every week in the news pages of Amateur Photographer magazine.
    I took this photo about 18 months ago, which I still think is quite a joyous shot of kids mucking around as the waves wash over the promenade at the seaside. That was taken in a popular tourist site with a compact camera. You just know that if my SLR came out, there’d be suspicious parents convinced I was a paedophile.
    Hanging around kids playgrounds probably isn’t the most sensible thing to do, but if we start getting paranoid about getting our cameras out, then there’s something wrong with the world. I believe that in North Korea they get don’t like just anyone taking pictures of anything. I’d hope that we don’t share too many similarities with the burghers of Pyongyang.