Your Rights When Confronted for Photography
on
July 30, 2006
Your Rights When Confronted for Photography
Photography is a great equalizer. Photography has enabled the defense of freedom and fundamental rights, providing evidence to the subversion of law and the trampling of those freedoms for later redress. A photo can shine light upon malfeasance that powerful perpetrators might otherwise lie their way out of.
No wonder those who protest too much about defending liberty, all the while subverting it, are doing all they can to prevent individuals from exercising this fundamental, transparentifying right.
As Bert P. Krages II points out in this fascinating introduction to a newly-released flyer called The Photographer's Right,
The right to take photographs is under assault now more than ever. People are being stopped, harassed, and even intimidated into handing over their personal property simply because they were taking photographs of subjects that made other people uncomfortable. Recent examples have included photographing industrial plants, bridges, and bus stations. For the most part, attempts to restrict photography are based on misguided fears about the supposed dangers that unrestricted photography presents to society.
Photography has not contributed to a decline in public safety or economic vitality in the United States. When people think back on the acts of terrorism that have occurred over the last forty years, none have depended on or even involved photography. Restrictions on photography would not have prevented any of these acts. Similarly, some corporations have a history of abusing the rights of photographers under the guise of protecting their trade secrets. These claims are almost always meritless because entities are required to keep trade secrets from public view if they want to protect them. Trade secret laws do not give anyone the right to restrain photographers from taking photographs in public places.
Read the article here and download the flyer here.
Posted by Brooks Cole
Gregory Heller July 31, 2006
While I generally agree that photographers (now most people, it would seem, could be considered photographers due to the camera phone in their pocket, or the digicam, for that matter) should have the right to photograph. I myself am a notorious shutter bug, yet I do have some privacy concerns around photography, especially when combined with distribution of those images online, and tagging and other identification tools, like Riya visual search.
We are very quickly becoming subjects of the Participatory Panopticon. There is great potential for good tom grow from this transparency, yet there is also the potential for massive violation of what we now think of as our "privacy".
Where we go with whom. We used to be reasonably certain that as long as someone we knew didn't see us, our roamings and the company we kept was relatively private. But now, more likely than not, we are captured on dozens of security cameras and in the background of private citizen's snapshots. More and more of that image data is now digital, making storage, transmission and analysis easier. Combine that with something like Riya, and our travels, and the company we keep can be mapped and tracked.
How can we support, on the one hand, a photographer's right to photograph (and the positive effects of such sousveillance), and oppose the surveillance systems run by state and private enterprise? All while respecting the citizen's right to (or reasonable expectation of) privacy.
Any thoughts Fen?
lev August 3, 2006
I'm also curious how Gregory's point lines up with a culture that is rapidly greenlighting life in the public sphere. Young people are growing up with a fierce desire to push ALL of their actions out into the corporate commons. They want the world to know who their friends are (MySpace, Friendster), who their favorite artists are/how often they listen (last.fm, iTunes DRM), what they take pictures of (flickr), and which video clips they think are funny (youtube). [Speaking of YouTube, they might just own your video.] Are we rapidly growing a generation who welcome an end to privacy? Or is that a gross exageration. (I imagine that as we grow up, we develop greater filters for which personal items we want displayed to the rest of the world.) How worried should I be?
lev July 31, 2006
Reading this post, I was reminded of WorldChanging's "Earth Witness" idea, so here's the link:
http://worldchanging.com/archives/004069.html
The notion that moblogging and the proliferation of camera phones could lead to some sort of decentralized, grass roots effort to bear witness, at a global scale, to the pain (both environmental and human-scale) we face on a daily basis.
