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Back in 2004, Iraqi gunmen loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abducted U.S. freelance photographer Paul Taggert because, as they later told The Associated Press, they thought he was a spy. Now, a new poster from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reinforces dangerous misconceptions by depicting a photographer as a terrorist.
"Don't let our
planes get into the wrong hands," reads the poster's caption
beneath an image of a man holding a camera with a telescopic lens pointed
through the chain-link fence of an airport. The poster comes a year after U.S. Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano went on Fox News and urged viewers to be suspicious
"if they see, for example,
somebody continually taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure
that doesn't seem to make any sense."
The National Press
Photographers Association sent a
letter on Monday to Napolitano, asking her to order U.S. security
authorities to remove the poster from display. "It is my understanding that airport administrators have been
directed to post and prominently display this material around airports 'one
poster per entrance,'" stated NPPA General
Counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher, who signed the letter. "I would have hoped that DHS and TSA would have
been more sensitive to free speech concerns after your statement last year on Fox
News regarding photography."
Worldwide, photographers are regularly
detained and harassed for doing their job. And that's true in the United States
as well. Lance Rosenfeld was on assignment this year for ProPublica and the PBS program
"Frontline," taking photographs related to the Gulf oil spill, when he
fell under suspicion. Rosenfeld
was detained in July near BP's refinery in Texas City, Texas, by police and
released only after authorities reviewed his images and collected his personal
identification information, which they then shared with BP, the company whose off-shore
drilling resulted in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
"In any free country, the balance between actual vigilance
and over-zealous enforcement is delicate," the photographers association wrote last
year to Napolitano. "It is one thing for DHS to act when there is
probable cause; it is quite another to abuse that discretion in order to create
a climate that chills free speech under the pretext of safety and security. It
is our position that the material targeted at the general aviation community
does just that."
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Yes because you know little brown men in turbins in caves take so many photos and terrorize us all the time. When will USA wake up and take our country back from these criminals and get our rights back? We need some heads on pikes. Starting with CONGRESS and all of DHS.
I can't wait to see a 10-year old child with a budding enthusiasm for aviation in custody of Homeland Security officials for taking pictures of a Cessna 172 at a general aviation airport with a Kodak Instamatic. The general public simply isn't trained to determined what's suspicious and what isn't. I remember reading history books about neighbors snitching on neighbors to the Nazis and how abhorrent it seemed, and yet, what's old seems to be getting new again.
This does seem a little irresponsible launching a poster like this. Posters can be very powerful and this should have been thought through a little better.
And all of George Orwell's 1984 come back to haunt us. He said something like one must put forth effort to seem normal. Gosh. I really never thought rubbish like this would happen.
Great post. I've visited your website several times and appreciate you're taking the time to update it. I’ll be a loyal visitor for a long time.