Damian might want to swap his Sigma 500mm for something more inconspicuous. It seems law enforcement around the world are on the lookout for anyone taking photographs.
Many would assume the men are tourists taking in the city’s sights, but law enforcement officials say they could be terrorists staking out possible targets.The scenarios were described at an anti-terrorism town hall meeting last week hosted by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. The meeting, held at Cordova’s First Assembly of God Church, was one of four public meetings that occurred in conjunction with Operation Sudden Impact, a new local anti-terrorism initiative.
“You may think a guy is just shooting pictures, but if you report it to us, we’ll send it on to the FBI and they may have four or five other reports of the same thing,” said Richard Pillsbury with the Tennessee Fusion Center, a collaboration between the Department of Safety and the Department of Homeland Security.
Is it just me or is this asking for trouble? Rather than working on reports of actual suspicious activity (setting off alarms is mentioned later, surely that is a bigger sign?), they will be inundated with calls about families snapping vacation shots?
More worrying, with the “war on fluids”, can you imagine what might happen if you are spotted with a DSLR and are supping from a liquid container greater than 20ml? 
4 Comments
Ah the terrorists will love this! Of course, they’re just using cameraphones at the moment … but I’m sure they’ll appreciate even more anti-terrorism resources being wasted and distracted by the red herrings they’ve created for themselves.
If you could condense all this stupidity of terror-fighting initiatives into a single person they’d be labelled as “insane” and sent off to a mental hospital!
As I say, terrorists are only terrorists when people are terrorised – so the real crime is the people who (a) can’t control their fear; and (b) the people exploiting the irrational fear of those people who can’t control their fear … to get to play with new toys and gadgets and suppress the “rowdy civilians” by applying legislation and new powers introduced in the name of fighting the Taliban … or something.
Yup, it makes you wonder how many of these “initiatives” are intended to make us more secure and how many are designed to make us more manageable …
This piece of news, as well as similar reports, annoys me to no end.
It seems like more and more posts equating photographers and terrorists are poppig up. I guess it’s about time we photographers learn to really act like terrorists, isn’t it?
Oh this is getting silly, whatever happened to freedom of speech and being able to take photographs in public places.
I understand that they are trying to ‘keep us safe’ but surely there is another way!
This just makes us the general public terrorised, on a permanent basis though. There’s got to be a better way.