Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
What a world we're in. Thanks to smartphones, iPads, and the like, everyone is now a photographer, but it turns out that, in the public landscape, there's ever less to photograph. So here are a few tips for living more comfortably in a photographically redacted version of our post-9/11 world.
Even if you're a professional photographer, don't try to take a picture of Korita Kent's "Rainbow Swash." It's "one of the largest copyrighted pieces of art in the world," painted atop a 140-foot-high liquefied natural gas tower in Dorchester, Massachusetts. James Prigoff, a former senior vice president of the Sara Lee Corporation and a known photographer, tried to do so and was confronted by two security guards who stopped him. Later, though he left no information about himself and was in a rented car, he was tracked down by the FBI. Evidently he had been dumped into the government's Suspicious Activity Reporting program run by the Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security. (And when you end up on a list like that, we know that it's always a living hell to get off it again.) He sums up his situation this way: "So, consider this: A professional photographer taking a photo of a well-known Boston landmark is now considered to be engaged in suspicious terrorist activity?"
And while you're at it, don't photograph the water tower in Farmer's Branch, Texas (as professional photographer Allison Smith found out), or planes taxiing to takeoff at the Denver airport (if you have a Middle Eastern look to you), or that dangerous "Welcome to Texas City" sign (as Austin photographer Lance Rosenfield discovered when stopped by BP security guards and only let off after "a stern lecture about terrorists and folks wandering around snapping photos"), or even the police handcuffing someone on the street from your own front lawn (as Rochester, New York, neighborhood activist Emily Good was doing when the police cuffed and arrested her for the criminal misdemeanor of "obstructing governmental administration").
The ACLU has just launched a suit challenging that Suspicious Activity Reporting database, claiming quite correctly -- as Linda Lye, one of their lawyers, puts it -- that the "problem with the suspicious-activity reporting program is that it sweeps up innocent Americans who have done nothing more than engage in innocent, everyday activity, like buying laptops or playing video games. It encourages racial and religious profiling, and targets constitutionally protected activity like photography."
You know the old phrase, "it's a free world?" Well, don't overdo it any more, thank you very much. Your safety, your security, and the well-being of an ever-expanding, ever more aggressive national (and local) security state and its various up-arming and up-armoring policing outfits increasingly trump that freedom. And let's face it, when it comes to your safety not from most of the real dangers of our American lives but from "terrorism," freedom itself really has been oversold. Remember the famous phrase from the height of the Cold War era, "better dead than red"? It seems to have been updated without the commies. Now, it's something like: "better surveilled than sorry." And based on that, all behavior is fast becoming potentially suspicious behavior.
Since 2013, State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren has been covering our new world of constricting freedoms in what he's termed "Post-Constitutional America" for TomDispatch. In "Dead Is Dead," his latest piece on the subject, he explores the government's newfound "right" to kill an American citizen without due process. It's the final part of his series on the shredding of the Bill of Rights.