There may be a thousand web pages listing the address of Darpa's offices in suburban Arlington, Virginia. But don't you dare take a picture of the agency's vaguely menacing office building at 3701 N. Fairfax Drive. Not unless you want to get hassled by the local cops.
Now, of course, local security officials have to be on the lookout for someone trying to conduct reconnaissance on such a government building; that's a possible precursor to a terrorist attack. But Keith McCammon snapped only a single shot of Darpa HQ, during one of his "photo walks," before he got harassed. Washington Post blog tells the story:
There's no big fat sign on the building, so how was McCammon to know that this was a building he dared not photograph? And why would the government care if anyone took a picture of the exterior of an office building? This is as silly and hypersensitive as the now-common harassment of people who innocently take pictures of random federal buildings in the District.
McCammon decided to fight back. He demanded to know why he had been stopped, why the government needed his personal information, and why any record of the incident should be kept in government records. He got quick, polite responses from Arlington officials. *
"I hope that you would agree that the security of any such building is of great importance and every law enforcement officer is duty bound to investigate all suspicious activity," wrote Arlington Acting Police Chief Daniel Murray.
"I am certainly not implying that a person taking photographs is inherently 'suspicious,' but when the appearance is that the subject of a photograph is a government installation, officers have a duty to ensure the safety of the occupants of this structure."*
Hmmm. Any *government installation? This overly broad approach to security is why we end up with ridiculous horror stories about innocent tourists getting hassled for taking photos of the
Lincoln Memorial or the Department of the Interior. The good news here is that Arlington police didn't take a report or create a file on
McCammon. The bad news is that they did pass his information along to
"the internal security agency for this installation." Which means that somewhere in the vast security apparatus that we have constructed since
9/11--utterly ignoring the fact that the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of its own paranoid security apparatus--there is now a report on Keith McCammon, photographer.
