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.

In Washington, the hostility towards photography in open spaces by tourists and amateurs, even members of the press and others seems particularly intense. On Washington’s metro system I’ve been approached by police and asked to show them the photos I had just taken. Another time, I was told I could not take a photo in the Metro because there was an elevated security level — but the rules publicly available did not back this up.

Often I was subject to scrutiny while others who were taking pictures were not. The only discernible difference I could imagine is that I often carried a Digital SLR camera body — so I either appeared professional (still not a crime) or somehow more competent (not a guarantee by any means) and the nature of my photography was apparently supposed not only to be different (a weak assumption) but extra-legal (false).

This year in Union Station, while I photographed an anti-war flash mob, I saw videographers get repeatedly approached by Amtrak police and suited officials and told they could not film. Enough seemed to challenge, in front of enough witnesses, that the authorities seemed to relent.

In 2002, while covering World Bank and anti-war protests as a then-contributor to an incarnation of DC Indymedia (which had been recognized by DC’s police department — which took our applications and had just begun to issue credentials to many of us) and collaborating with the DC Radio-Coop (a project of organizers with Washington’s Pacifica station WPFW and DC Indymedia), I was swept up in a mass-arrest. Other other press, legal observers, medics, passers-by, and demonstrators — were all illegally arrested. I’ve been shown video of cops pointing to me, and arresting me out of sequence from the crowd they corralled after I had held my camera up above my head in trying to get shots of the arrests at the other end of compressed block of people I was in.

I spent hours in buses and hog-tied on mat, spending time with AP, Newsweek, and Magnum photographers. All but the Magnum photographer and myself got released early, apparently after negotiations between their employers/sponsors and the authorities. When those who could be were contacted, all those who were sprung early with the help of their boss were reluctant to join a free-press oriented lawsuit a credentialed videographer and I tried to organize. Eventually we joined a different suit that included protest participants, which the Magnum photographer also eventually joined coincidentally, and we settled without pressing the issues specific to our journalist status. The Committee to Protect Journalists included mention of the arrests in a press release.

It isn’t just Washington, DC, though: After Boing Boing picked up on Andy Carvin’s story, they shared a couple more similarly themed accounts from the Los Angeles area, one involving the FBI.

Similar instances of arbitrary rules or baseless enforcement of allegedly applicable rules or laws regarding photography have been reported on in the past too. Including twice in the past couple of years where the New York City Metro Transit Authority and the city government was subject to a public backlash after the respective authorities expressed the intent to implement more restrictive rules on the basis of security and public safety.

The example of Union Station raises concerns both about the civil liberties associated with photographing that which is plain view to the public, and the encroachment of civil liberties in general by places that seem public but which are not. This isn’t always a factor of increased privatization of what was public. Sometimes the entities that own or control certain spaces that were always technically private and [mis?-]understood to be public seem to exploit the murkiness of places that are — by most perceptions — seen as public because of their association with public spaces and public or government-subsidized services.

I know there are lawyers will say my qualifiers are going too far, but when we’re talking about subsidies, public-private corporations, and hubs of public services, I think the equivocation on the “privateness” is deserved. In the case of Union Station, I’m talking about Amtrak and the Washington Metro system.

This is likely to get edited for clarity and updated for the addition of sources after I get some sleep and Twitter comes back up.