@Randem

I’m getting really tired of seeing this stuff. Tourists, doing tourist things in tourist places are not allowed to be tourists any more. Even in Disneyland:

Just as I took this photo, however, a Security Cast Member in a patrol unit approached me (well, he stopped a ways away and shouted through a rolled-down window) and told me photography was not permitted there. Since that statement didn’t make any sense, my first reaction was to question why that was. As I evaluated the possible responses, I thought “security” or “because I said so” would be what I’d get, so I complied and continued walking. I brought this up to appropriate people, who agreed there is no blanket prohibition of photography there.

Seriously, what’s the harm in a photo? As a photographer, I understand the rules about having a signed release if you plan to print your photo for profit. But that has no bearing whatsoever on taking a photo for personal use, nor even to be printed and distributed in a documentary context.

People need to be aware of their rights when holding a camera. It is not okay for Big Brother to push people around, even in the name of anti-terrorism. Nor is it okay for ignorant security personnel to make up the rules as they go.

What complete and utter idiocy, that people have demonized the act of taking a photo. In the latest example, security at London’s Spitalfields market made an attempt to forcefully delete photos taken by a patron of the market.

Here in London, you get photographed upwards of 300 times a day, by every junior sneak, pecksniff, and petty CCTV operator who can afford a cheap little camera. The cameras often fail to help catch criminals, and they certainly don’t deter desperate muggers and junkies and stupid drunken kids. All the law seems to require by way of consumer protection is a sign saying, “You’re being filmed.”

You can be photographed again and again, but heaven help you if you take a picture back. Your person isn’t deserving of any serious privacy protection, but buildings, t-shirts, shop-windows, and market stalls are all entitled to unlimited protection from having their precious photons stolen.

It really bothers me to no end. Seriously. I would like to know exactly what devious mischief they think is going to come about from someone taking a photograph.

Or perhaps it’s not so much that they fear the patrons committing the mischief, but perhaps that there is some bigger mischief already afoot, which they wish to prevent people from capturing. Kinda makes the mind wander…

With elections coming, there’s a lot of discussion about The War Against Terror (TWAT). TWAT is going to be a big issue when you go to the poll, so I think it’s important to understand all the ins and outs.

First, it comes as no surprised that TWAT was first proposed during the Clinton administration. It was well known that Bin Laden wanted to blow our towers. (He had already tried to do it once in the garage.) The proposal, however, came at the end of Clinton’s term, so it was decided that the next administration should be given the reigns in deciding how to proceed, so TWAT was handed to Bush, whose was debriefed early in his term.

Bush dropped the ball. Bush and Dick didn’t take TWAT seriously, so they didn’t use protection. The end result: a 19-man mile-high club blew our towers. That got Bush hot and bothered, and he responded by shooting his load in Afghanistan.

The real problems started, though, when Bush and Dick got bent, and decide to go after Iraq in search of lubrication. The oval office thought the Iraqis would welcome us openly, so they just charged right in to the dry climate, without any foreplay.

As it turns out, the Iraqis didn’t really want it, they were just caught up in the moment. And then it got out that Bush and Dick were lying, saying whatever they had to just to get some action. At one point, they changed positions and Colin got irritated.

Nobody was prepared. Our guys were inserted without adequate protection and they’ve been pounding away at TWAT for quite some time. The friction has been intense, and lately they’re even experiencing surges. The whole thing seems ready to blow, and now the question is whether we should pull out, or stay in and make a long-term commitment.

If our guys pull out, they can come home and get some rest, and be ready to party next weekend. But Bush wants to stay in, because he wants to give birth to a new democracy. But the problem is, we were never committed to Iraq, we just wanted to get in their plants, and if you give birth without commitment you end up paying for it for the next 20 years.

As far as I can tell, the real issue is that Bush thinks he’s already sown the seeds of democracy, and he’s against aborting, so he thinks there’s only one thing left to do. But other people disagree; they think that we haven’t climaxed yet, and that we can avoid a big mistake before it’s too late.

It comes down to this: Bush tried to date-rape the middle east, knock them up, and then leave us paying child support… but our country can’t even afford our own children. Sometimes, it’s better to pull out.

Tuesday marked the beginning of a new year, and that means new regulations. Yes, our friends in the government have stepped up their vigilance in the war against photography - er, I mean terror. Starting with the beginning of this year, they won’t allow you to bring spare lithium batteries on your plane. Naturally, they don’t say why. So if you’re flying out to do some photography, you’d better make sure it can all be done on one battery.

Last September, Scott Kelby wrote about his experience in Minneapolis/St. Paul where TSA agents made him remove his DSLR camera from his camera bag and place it on the scanning belt separately, the way that you have to with laptops. Then they dusted his camera bag for explosives! They claimed this was part of a new policy instated in August which few airports have actually implemented. (Sounds like bullshit to me.)

It all kind of makes you wonder if some property of the lithium batteries doesn’t react well to the new security scanners. I wouldn’t be surprised if the batteries had a characteristic that prevented the scanners from seeing behind them, making them some sort of camouflage for other forbidden materials. I may just have to find myself a lithium battery from somewhere and take it with me next time I fly, just to see if they actually even notice.

Check out this chilling opinion from Donald Kerr, the US Principal Deputy Director of Intelligence:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Orwell was warning about when he wrote 1984.

Sorry, but I can not accept the idea that we have no privacy and must simply trust the eavesdroppers to safeguard my private communications. It’s been known for years that secret wiretapping tools like Echelon, Carnivore, and Magic Lantern have been available, for a price, to steal corporate secrets even before the threat of terrorism became hip and trendy.

And worse, while we know we can’t always trust the government, we still understand that we should be able to. But nobody is fooling themselves into believing that businesses have our best interest in mind. Putting the power of secret surveillance into the hands of certain businesses (the telecom industry, for instance) runs the risk of turning the key players into high-power information brokers. Does anyone need to be reminded of Ma Bell? Or more recently, Enron?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only acceptable answer is not to give that power in the first place.

Why are we still fooling ourselves into thinking all this security stuff actually matters?  It’s all just window dressing. Take for instance this story in the Chicago Tribune:

More than 20 workers were arrested today at O’Hare International Airport after authorities said employees at a suburban staffing agency used fraudulent security badges to gain access to unauthorized areas of the airport.

Twenty people? Surely we must have uncovered a major terrorist cell, and prevented a big attack, right? Read on:

According to criminal complaints unsealed today, Ideal Staffing managers told workers they needed identification to work at O’Hare, but that the documents did not need to be legitimate. Federal authorities allege more than 100 temporary workers employed by the agency were in possession of fraudulently obtained airport security badges, which allowed the workers to gain access to secure areas of the airport while loading pallets, freight and meals for companies doing business at O’Hare.

Look. When a staffing company tells its employees that they need badges but they don’t need to be legitimate, that’s a sign of just how impotent our national security window dressing actually is. Sure, it’s illegal, and they should be punished. But is terrorism legal? No. The point of national security isn’t to stop the people who are following the rules, it’s supposed to be there to catch the people who are breaking them!

This is the same as the gun control laws that only take guns away from good citizens while doing nothing to stop criminals. The security badges only stopped legitimate, law abiding citizens who follow the rules from being in areas where they don’t belong. Meanwhile the people with fake IDs - potential threats to our national security - were granted full access to the airport.

Federal Judge Ann Aiken thinks so.

In a ruling released yesterday, Judge Aiken found sections 1804 and 1823 in violation of our constitutional guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“Now, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the government can conduct surveillance to gather evidence for use in a criminal case without a traditional warrant, as long as it presents a non-reviewable assertion that it also has a significant interest in the targeted person for foreign intelligence purposes,” wrote Judge Aiken in her opinion.

In addition to finding the relevant sections of the Patriot Act unconstitutional, the judge also ordered the government to destroy all the illegally-obtained evidence.

You can read more about it at Ars Technica.

Oh, how boring would my life be if I didn’t have the TSA to keep me entertained? Just like last time, these ever-vigilant defenders of justice have thwarted a deviously masterminded plan to sneak a cup of coffee on board an airplane, clearly violating that most important of safety regulations: no liquids.

Well thank God our heroes of the airways stopped that passenger from drinking all that coffee, because he had a box-cutter. If he’d been allowed to get all wired and jittery on caffeine, while cramped into that tiny space on board the plane, he might have gone crazy!

I’m starting to see the logic. I mean what other possible catastrophes may have been thwarted thanks to the liquid ban?

• Too-much-aftershave-guy can’t bring his Aqua Velva in his carry on, preventing the people next to him from getting fed up with the scent and going ape shit at 30,000 feet.
• Kids can’t bring their 400-oz aluminum can of energy drink with them, so they get tired of kicking the seat in front of them after an hour or so, instead of three or four hours, causing the person seated in front of them to go ape shit at 30,000 feet.
• Pet lovers won’t be able to put their goldfish in a bag of water and fly it with them on vacation. Sure, maybe the fish will die from not being fed, but at least it won’t cause the cat in the lap of the person next to you to go ape shit at 30,000 feet and scratch up everyone in the cabin.
• Vegetable oil, which kills you from the inside, will definitely not be clogging any arteries, making your heart go ape shit at 30,000 feet.
• No shampoo, so there won’t be any women getting naked and shampooing their hair with Herbal Essesnces, causing some sex-starved maniac to go ape shit at 30,000 feet.
• There will be no sun-tan lotion, relieving you of the temptation to climb out onto the wing and work on your tan at 30,000 feet.

I brought it up here and here, and then overtly raised the question here: why does it seem that the terror threats always seem to increase right before an election?

It appears that I now have my answer. The New Republic has an article up detailing the research of three psychologists who’ve discovered that behavior can be altered to favor one candidate over another when the voters’ are encouraged (subconsciously, of course) of their mortality.

In their experiments, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski make a good case that mortality reminders from September 11 enhanced Bush’s popularity through November 2004. But, on the basis of their research, it is possible to draw even broader conclusions about U.S. politics after September 11. Mortality reminders not only enhanced the appeal of Bush’s political style but also deepened and broadened the appeal of the conservative social positions that Republicans had been running on.

Scary stuff, man. Go read it. Understand what they’re doing. Subconscious manipulation stops working once you’re conscious of it.

The last bastions of hope in our defense against hijacking hijinks, the TSA, have proven once again that safety and security are not possible with bureaucracy.

In their latest caper, those wild-and-zany protectors of our freedom ran a passenger’s bag through the security scanner and saw something that looked suspicious. The scanner operator waved over another TSA employee, who confirmed the suspiciousness of the item on the scanner. Lucy! You got some ’splainin to do! The passenger had brazenly tried to carry a container of pudding on board the airplane, and it would have worked, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.

The crusaders of justice had prevailed, thwarting another evil attempt to carry a liquid onto an airplane. Freedom has been protected. Americans can sleep safely at night, confident that Bin Laden and his brood won’t get past our defenses.

Later in the day, after his first flight and before his connecting flight, our passenger was rummaging through his bag in search of a pen, when he discovered he had inadvertently left a knife with a four-inch blade in his bag. One can only presume that possession of a stabby-stab knife of stabbing is not nearly as big a threat to our national security as a pudding. Maybe it’s the calories.