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.