Daily Archives: June 18, 2009

Back to the future

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Many moons ago, one of my favourite cameras was an Olympus Pen. It was light, unobtrusive and had terrific optics. Well, guess what? Its spirit lives on.

Finally, Olympus has introduced its long-awaited Micro Four Thirds camera, and the E-P1 looks a lot like 1959. It’s a compact, slick-looking retro model that pays homage to the company’s PEN-series cameras that had their debut 50 years ago.

Think of the E-P1 as the love child of a point-and-shoot camera and a digital single-lens reflex. Olympus says the 12.3-megapixel E-P1, the world’s smallest interchangeable lens camera, marries the image quality of D.S.L.R. models with high-definition video capabilities found on smaller cameras. It also includes 16-bit stereo audio.

The E-P1 will be available in July as a body-only option $750 as well as in two kits: one with a Zuiko 14mm-42mm f3.5-5.6 $800 3X zoom lens and another with a 17mm f2.8 $900 prime lens.

Police face prosecution for obstructing photographers

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Hooray! At last some sense of proportion. This from Press Gazette.

Lord Carlile QC, who reviews anti-terror legislation, said officers who use force or threats against photographers to make them delete images could face prosecution themselves.

Section 58A of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force in February, bans photographers from taking pictures of the police if the photographs could be useful to terrorists.

Lord Carlile said this was a "high bar" and should not be used to interfere with day-to-day photography of officers which is "as legitimate as before".

One photographer wrote to him to complain about being forced to delete an image from his camera of an officer on traffic duty.

In his annual review of anti-terror laws, Lord Carlile said: “It should be emphasised that photography of the police by the media or amateurs remains as legitimate as before, unless the photograph is likely to be of use to a terrorist. This is a high bar.

“It is inexcusable for police officers ever to use this provision to interfere with the rights of individuals to take photographs.

“The police must adjust to the undoubted fact that the scrutiny of them by members of the public is at least proportional to any increase in police powers – given the ubiquity of photograph and video-enabled mobile phones.

“Police officers who use force or threaten force in this context run the real risk of being prosecuted themselves for one or more of several possible criminal and disciplinary offences.”

About time.

Sunlight, not PDF, is the best disinfectant

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So Parliament has finally published the data on MPs’ allowances. Except, of course, that it hasn’t, really. Here’s an example: a part of the ‘return’ for Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton South:

Note that there’s no way of determining where her second home is. It’s the same story as one wades through her ‘receipts’. For example:

The more I look at this stuff, the more I appreciate how much old-style journalistic digging the Telegraph did. Knowing the address of Moran’s second home was just the starting point. So to denounce the Telegraph revelations as mere ‘cheque-book journalism’ is spectacularly to miss the point.

Oddly enough, this is also a case where networked journalism would have worked — if the data had been out there in non-censored form then we could have crowd-sourced the investigation of individual MPs.

UPDATE: The Guardian is already crowdsourcing the job. I’ve just spent a happy hour poring through the expenses returns of Ben Wallace, the Tory MP for Lancaster and Wyre. Wonder why he spends so much money on (a) IT services and (b) ‘executive’ cars.