The Photography Threat

From a gothamist.com post over the weekend comes word of another incident where a citizen was approached by law enforcement over their use of a small hand held device used to capture images for later reproduction, aka the camera. This particular story concerns a photo-blogger taking pictures of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The often stinky and always dirty canal provides a lot of opportunities for interesting photographs as it runs through an industrial area of Brooklyn, is crossed by a number of little used draw bridges, and is home to a few boats and occasional brave ducks. A number of popular NYC blogs make the canal and its surrounding neighborhoods their main topics.

Just for fun, here is a photo of the canal that somehow appeared in my very own camera a few months back:



The power of common sense has been talked about before on plasticblog but it can never be mentioned too much. How about instead of this patch-work effort to thwart terrorism through random and nominal restrictions on photography and liquid volumes, not to mention large scale military incursions into a nation that was not a threat, the government works on weening us off of oil and rethinks our foreign policy in the middle east?