Tag Archives: civil liberties

In higher relief

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I’m listening to the reading of the Declaration of Independence on NPR this morning as I read the news.

I am not encouraged as the two hundred and thirty two years old litany of complaints echoes through my head and I compare them to the nature of the recent news an analysis (see the clippings at the side) relating to the same issues in this country today. From the latest uses of the police and the military and intelligence, to the further co-opting of corporations, to the short-sighted capitulation of politicians who have proclaimed solidarity with the principles of of this document and our Constitution, we seem to be going backwards.

Washington is so full of contrasts between principles and actions — that is, hypocrisy — that one becomes weary rather than more indignant. One feels foolish to get riled up sometimes. The culture encourages the belief that to repeatedly ask for such discrepancies — obvious to all who bother to look — to be reconciled is to be “biased” (like everyone else, and therefore hardly worth paying attention to) or merely to pedantic to be relevant.

But if today has any meaning at all, then it is to raise such things in even higher relief. Perhaps it is the inherent nature of the State?

NPR’s new media guru questionably shut-out by Union Station security

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NPR’s new media guy, Andy Carvin, was loaned a Gigapan camera rig from Carnegie Mellon recently. I followed his excitement about the chance to take great high-resolution panoramic photographs of Washington on Twitter. Yesterday he broadcast that he was taking it to Washington’s Union Station. Not much later he was sharing in near-real-time a confrontation with security.

The way Carvin tells it, he was first asked what he was doing and left alone, seemingly with permission, to go about his business. Then security returned giving conflicting messages about what he could and couldn’t do, and why (read his account). He was threatened with arrest multiple times. After pressing for a coherent explanation and to talk to bosses, he still had to pack-up and leave.

Before I express my solidarity, I do want to say Carvin should not have been surprised that he’d get some trouble: The Gigapan requires a tripod and rules against tripods have been common for a while, well before the so-called post-9/11 era.

Aside from security issues, more mundane rules and bureaucratic measures that require special permission for some photography in the name of safety and congestion have been in place for some time in many public and private spaces, particularly in Washington, DC. If one is going to use a tripod and is involved in any sort of media making, they should expect to be challenged by those responsible for the space if nothing is pre-arranged. I do think such policies are sometimes questionable and are often arbitrarily enforced but as an employee of NPR, he might have more easily obtained special permission to use his tripod. That said, the conflicting permission and conflicting reasoning Carvin recounts sort of balances that out.

Fundamentally, I think indignance over this treatment is justified. Often in the name of security, and sometimes in the name of private property, civil liberties are aggressively curtailed by security officials who often seem to know less about the rules they’re apparently enforcing than the bill of rights some of them (at least when they’re police) are sworn to protect. That isn’t saying much.

I have witnessed and experienced similar situations myself.

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