Is it a crime to take pictures?

By Victoria Bone

BBC News

Photographers staged a mass photo call in protest at the law

From today, anyone taking a photograph of a police officer could be deemed to have committed a criminal offence.

That is because of a new law - Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act - which has come into force.

It permits the arrest of anyone found "eliciting, publishing or communicating information" relating to members of the armed forces, intelligence services and police officers, which is "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism".

That means anyone taking a picture of one of those people could face a fine or a prison sentence of up to 10 years, if a link to terrorism is proved.

The law has angered photographers, both professional and amateur, who fear it could exacerbate the harassment they already sometimes face.

On Monday, a group is gathering outside New Scotland Yard for a "mass picture-taking session" in protest.

The event is organised by the National Union of Journalists. It insists the right to take pictures in public places is "a precious freedom" that must be safeguarded.

NUJ organiser John Toner said: "Police officers are in news pictures at all sorts of events - football matches, carnivals, state processions - so the union wants to make it clear that taking their pictures is not the act of a criminal."

'Suspicious circumstances'

The British Journal of Photography recently reported an incident involving a photographer in Cleveland who was stopped by a police officer while taking pictures of ships.

He was asked if he was connected to terrorism, which he wasn't, and told his details would be kept on file.

A Cleveland police spokeswoman told the journal that "in order to verify a person's actions as being entirely innocent," anyone in "suspicious circumstances" could be asked to explain themselves.

Photojournalist Marc Vallée is among those angry at the law. He specialises in covering protests and fears for the implications of Section 76.

"Alarm bells really are ringing," he told the BBC News website.

"I know some of it sounds a bit funny. Train spotters being stopped for taking pictures, that sort of thing, but I've spoken to people who've been on their own, at night and they're surrounded by several officers. It can be intimidating.

"It may be that officers are just doing their best with a bad law, but if that's the case, they need guidance to tell them, 'Stop harassing photographers.'"

Mr Vallée also pointed out that members of the Royal Family were part of the Armed Forces.

"Are we going to be stopped from photographing them?" he said.

'Outrageous'

The NUJ said some police officers wrongly believed they had the right to delete photographers' images.

Other critics, meanwhile, fear the new law could inhibit their right to peaceful, democratic protest.

Leo Murray is a spokesman for climate change campaign group Plane Stupid. His members film any direct action they take.

"It's outrageous," he told the BBC News website. "It's yet another in a long line of measures designed to erode people's civil liberties.

"Being able to film the police has completely changed the way they are able to police our protests. It's made us much, much safer and the risks of a violent confrontation have almost disappeared.

"If we couldn't film they could act with impunity, they could just mete out violence with the confidence that nobody would find out.

"There's absolutely no way we are going to observe this ban. If they try to bring charges against us we will fight them in the courts."

In a statement, Number 10 said that while there were no legal restrictions on taking pictures in public places, "the law applies to photographers as it does to anybody else".

"So there may be situations in which the taking of photographs may cause or lead to public order situations, inflame an already tense situation, or raise security considerations," it said.

Photographers could therefore be asked to "move on" for the safety of themselves or others.

"Each situation will be different and it would be an operational matter for the police officer concerned as to what action should be taken," the statement added.

Junior officers

This discretion, however, is what some feel is the key problem with the law.

Neil Turner, vice chairman of the British Press Photographers' Association, said he believed there was no intention among senior ranks of the police to prevent legitimate photography.

"The problems that we can see arising are with junior officers using the legislation to overcome situations that they find uncomfortable or where they make judgements about photography and don't know how to apply the legislation on the ground," he said.

"We firmly expect that there will be inappropriate uses of the act and that someone will end up in front of a judge before there is some clarity and before the purpose of the act is properly defined."

The Metropolitan Police insisted the law was intended to protect counter-terrorism officers and any prosecution would have to be in the public interest.

"For the offence to be committed, the information would have to raise a reasonable suspicion that it was intended to be used to provide practical assistance to terrorists," it said.

"Taking photographs of police officers would not, except in very exceptional circumstances, be caught by this offence."

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ELAINE THOMPSON/AP/FILE








By Susan Llewelyn Leach | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

If you pull out a camera on a New Jersey train, you will have company - law enforcement company. If you size up a shot on the New York subway, you'll probably be questioned by security and told to keep the lens cap tightly on. Even if you plan to snap some innocuous bank building from a public sidewalk, you might find guards telling you it's not allowed.

"Is photography becoming illegal in the United States?" asks Jim McGee, in a column for the online photo magazine Vivid Light Photography.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that heightened sensitivities over security in the wake of 9/11 have put a crimp in photographers' freedom to shoot in public, even if the laws remain largely unchanged. News that Al Qaeda operatives canvassed targets with cameras has made taking shots of federal buildings, bridges, power plants, and the like seem less innocent.

Last year, after the Madrid train bombing, New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority proposed a ban on photography on its subways and buses (New Jersey already had a ban in place). Public protest was such that now, more than a year later, the proposal has stalled.

But "just because it's not law yet, doesn't mean there aren't people trying to enforce it," says Alicia Wagner Calzada, vice president of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA).

Part of the problem, she suggests, is police officers and security guards who are uneducated about the law.

The USA Patriot Act, with its broad definition of "suspicious activity," has cracked the door wider to individual interpretation.

Ms. Calzada offers the example of a small-town photojournalist in Victoria, Texas, who was taking shots of potholes for a newspaper story last year when a police officer drove by several times. Finally, the officer stopped and questioned him and, even after running an ID check, bluntly declared the photographer's actions suspicious and intimated he'd be keeping an eye on him, the photographer recalls.

In most cases where photojournalists have been accused of shooting illegally and detained, they have been released without charge, Calzada says.

If security is sometimes overzealous, the rules themselves can also be vague and ad hoc. Overlapping law enforcement agencies, new restrictions imposed by local municipalities, and beefed-up security have all added to the murkiness.

"TSA [Transportation Security Administration] and [the Department of] Homeland Security have put a whole 'nother layer of protection and concern and a level of bureaucracy to what journalists used to see as free rein," says Kenneth Irby, visual journalism group leader at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

In general, photojournalists have no more rights than ordinary citizens to take pictures.

If you're standing on public property, you can shoot anything the naked eye can see, explains Ken Kobre, professor of photojournalism at San Francisco State University and author of one of the seminal textbooks on the subject.

What you can't do, he says, is use a telephoto lens and take shots through office windows or into private residences, where people would have a "reasonable expectation of privacy." That would be like eavesdropping or surreptitiously taping someone, he says.

But if a story is newsworthy and in the public interest, then taking photos even on private property is usually permissible, he adds.

Photographing the outside of buildings - schools, hospitals, and even government buildings - is also legal. It's when you go inside that you need permission.

In most cases, Professor Kobre says, people are evicted for trespassing rather than invasion of privacy.

What surprises him, though, is the logic behind preventing people from taking pictures of building facades. "I haven't heard of an example where it makes any sense to stop anyone," he says, "because, almost in every case, you can walk a block away and use a longer lens."

Whether the logic is compelling or not, law enforcement has knocked heads with photojournalists for decades. The apparent tightening of access during recent years is less a function of more run-ins with the authorities, says Mr. Irby, who has seen no evidence of that, than the media's increased coverage of those encounters.

"In the past, when photographers were detained and even arrested, the news organizations would likely contact the commanding officer at the precinct ... and everything would be settled," he says. Now, in a time of heavy national security and greater public interest in press freedom, "those stories become stories."

Despite that higher profile, most incidents, Irby adds, are connected less to the war on terrorism than to the standard traffic accident or homicide scene.

Other factors play a role as well. During the past 10 to 15 years, police and even bystanders have become less tolerant of photojournalists, Kobre says. "The public really reached its apex of being fed up" with paparazzi after Princess Diana's death, he says. And the distinction between paparazzi and mainstream journalists is disappearing as celebrity journalism seeps into all areas of the media. [ Editor's note: The original version misattributed Kobre's quote.]

The bigger issue Kobre sees is privacy and the ease with which individuals can take clandestine photos with cellphone cameras.

"Before, you had to go to some trouble to hide the camera," he says. "Now you look like you're making a telephone call and boom! You've got [an embarrassing] photograph of someone." If that ends up on a blog, can the subject sue? Kobre asks.

In terms of the general public, he says, this "is going to explode as a problem."