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Private enterprise versus personal photography
Link: http://www.nowpublic.com/photography_banned_downtown_silver_spring_maryland
When's a public street not a public street? The answer is "When it's a diguised shopping mall". There's a case at the moment where a development partially funded with public money using a public street is now covered by faux-anti-photography laws because it's a privately-owned establishment. If the locations were indeed security sensitive (military installation, bank internals) or privacy related (invasion of personal privacy, stalking of customers) I might understand, but this seems to be neither.
It's not the first time this has happened either. Here's another incident from an Australian shopping centre and here's an earlier example from Los Angeles. This has been going on for a while; here's a Slate article about it from 1995 which is where I first came across the issue.
(Via BoingBoing)
1 comment
So I guess the trend now is for Big Brother to move out of public spaces into private ones. Thus I suppose the need for public law enforcement will fall as the demand for private law enforcement rises. But I’m undecided as to which is the lesser of two evils: a totalitarian regime run by layers of government or a totalitarian one sponsored by a string of corporations. Yet one thing remains clear: I’d rather not see 1984 in stereo!
