August 19, 2004
Terrorism, Photography, and Civil Rights
Lloyd Grove, the Daily News' gossip columnist, reports today that, in separate incidents, police interrogated a well-known book critic and some interns from New York magazine after they were observed photographing public property.
In the first incident, some architectural interns helping out with a story for the magazine photographed jersey barriers around a SoHo post office. The story they were working on was about "how to make security barriers look nicer." So they got hauled in and were interrogated by the NYPD and the Secret Service for 2.5 hours and were not released until their firm's lawyer contacted police and apparently demanded their release.
In the other incident, Dale Peck, who has earned a name for himself lately with his harsh book reviews, was also working on an essay about architecture. He was photographing the area around 1 Police Plaza and the police brought him in for questioning, too. After an hour, they let him go, but -- get this -- not before DELETING A PICTURE OF A BROOKLYN BRIDGE RAMP from his camera.
Believe me, I understand the need for some security precautions and "vigilance," etc., but how can it possibly be necessary -- or even legal -- to interrogate journalists, or anyone else, for taking pictures of public property? You know how people, pre-9/11, used to say, "We have to be careful about becoming the thing we're fighting against"? People tend to be dismissive of such thoughts ("That could never happen here"), but I think it's important to realize that the loss of an open society is not something that necessarily happens overnight. Instead, a slow erosion of our rights will ultimately have the same effect, but with fewer people objecting along the way.
So far, the government has done a very poor job at balancing civil liberties with the need to protect its citizenry. We end up with stuff like the Patriot Act, which lets the government snoop on our library habits and incarcerate us without trial, and we have police interfering with benign acts like taking pictures. I guess this is because America has never confronted an internal threat like terrorism before, and so the only solution anyone can come up with is to take all these extreme "zero tolerance" measures that give the appearance of being tough on terrorism, but in reality do very little to protect us and deprive us of rights we've had for hundreds of years.
It's ironic to me that at the same time politicians are proclaiming to the world how we are fighting for "liberty," Americans have seen an almost-unprecedented decline in their own civil rights. Furthermore, we're asked to "go on about our daily lives," even as the police and federal government question us for doing exactly that. And yet, this decline in our freedom has gone almost entirely unchallenged. Unchallenged?, you say? Absolutely. Think about it: The incidents described above were reported in the GOSSIP column of the city's lower-circulation tabloid. Pre-9/11, wouldn't "police interrogate interns for taking pictures of post office" have been met with concern and front-page headlines in all the city's papers?
Am I being alarmist or unnecessarily sensitive? I don't think so. Just ask yourself, in what other countries do citizens get interrogated by federal agencies for taking pictures of post offices and bridges? Do you want America to be like those countries?
I wasn't going to mention it here, but it seems to be appropriate now. There was a widely reported story yesterday that the FBI has begun questioning individuals involved with various political protest groups, supposedly to find out if they know of anyone planning to commit a crime during the Republican Convention. This was authorized at the highest levels of the Justice Department, which seemed to ignore the obvious chilling effect this will have on legal protests on the city. All Americans should be able to speak their minds without having to consider for even a moment that they are being monitored by the government, but this latest move sends a very clear message to the activists that their movements are being watched with interest.
Times have changed, to be sure, but the solution to making New York less scary is not to be suspicious of everyone, nor is it to perpetually frighten us and use that fear as an means of ensuring compliance with government policy. The federal, state, and local governments need to do a better job of ensuring our rights as they attempt to protect us, and we need to do a better job of demanding that they do.
Source: NYDN (second item)
Further reading: Ian Spiers' amazing story of being interrogated for taking pictures
categories:
Legal System, Terrorism
posted by adm at August 19, 2004 2:03 PM
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