The Met’s Rodney King moment

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This morning’s Observer column.

The police have two choices. Accept that digital technology will make them accountable for their actions or try to control the technology. In any normal society there would be no decision to be made. But since 9/11 the threat of global terrorism has given the state – and its security apparatus – carte blanche to take whatever measures it deems necessary. And it has imbued in every uniformed operative, from ‘Community Support’ officers and the bobby on the beat to the bored guy in the airport checking your toothpaste, the kind of arrogance we once associated only with authoritarian regimes.

You think I jest? Talk to any keen amateur photographer. As a group, photographers have been subjected to increasingly outrageous harassment by police and security operatives. (For a partial list of incidents see bit.ly/22VFRX). Try photographing a bridge, public building or a police car parked on a double-yellow line and you will have a goon demanding your camera, image card or film.

Better still, ask John Randall, a Tory MP who recently told the Commons how one of his Uxbridge constituents, a Mr Wusche, photographed properties he thought were in bad repair to pass on to the council…

Marina Hyde had a great column on the same subject in yesterday’s Guardian:

If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises “watchful vigilance from underneath”, by citizens, of those who survey and control them.

Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse – “security reasons”.

Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities – to kettle it, if you will – no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.

Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson’s passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes’s tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering…

Some people have emailed to say that they find the closing prediction of my column (that police from now on will start confiscating cameras) implausible. Well, they clearly haven’t read Section 76 of the Counter-Terrorism Act, which came into force on 16 February. That makes it an offence to photograph any police officer or member of the armed services in ways that could aid terrorism. As Roger Graef (one of the wisest people I know in this field) pointed out yesterday much — if not most — policing of demonstrations these days is ‘justified’ not just under the Public Order acts, but anti-terror legislation which gives anyone in uniform authority to do or ban almost anything.

In fact, one of the great ironies of the Bob Quick case is that the photographer who took the picture could have been prosecuted under Section 76. And probably would have been if he hadn’t got the picture out quickly.

The bigger picture is that Osama bin Laden has won, hands-down. He provoked Western democracies into an obsession with security that justifies any degree of trampling on liberty. He stimulated the introduction of legislation (like the Patriot Act in the US) and the Counter-Terrorism Act in the UK which enables the State to treat ANY activity, including legitimate democratic activity (like protesting against the looting of the banking system, the launching of a war under false pretences, the banning of fox-hunting or airport expansion) not as a nuisance to the normal business of a city but as a threat to the State itself.

Simple pleasures

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We’re in North Norfolk, the beauty of which is one of the best-kept secrets in British life. Yesterday we went on a long coastal walk, and although I’m clueless about birds, in the course of the afternoon I saw: avocets, a curlew, black-headed gulls, a lapwing, cormorants, several shelducks, oystercatchers and lots of dunlins. The curlew seemed to me a Very Superior Chap, making his way delicately through the muddy creek like a Victorian gentleman with a walking stick.

No photographs, alas. Bird pictures require the carrying of serious kit, including the kind of lenses normally used only by those shooting celebs on Mustique. And certainly not what one would carry on an afternoon walk.

Thought for the day

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(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

It’s Good Friday. To anyone who grew up in rural Ireland in the 1950s this was the most boring day of the year. Nothing moved. All the shops were closed — as were the pubs. There was boiled fish for lunch. And then three interminable hours of religious ceremony from 3pm to 6pm, with purple shrouds over all crucifixes in the church and incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo (in Latin). And, I seem to remember, a preposterous rite known as the ‘stations of the cross’ in which the faithful symbolically retraced various stages in Christ’s journey towards crucifixion.

One Good Friday, however, stands out in my memory. It was the day our first new car arrived. For a family in our circumstances, this was a Really Big Deal. Up to then we had coped by borrowing cars for holidays and weekends from indulgent garage proprietors (who were pals of my dad and invariably had a wreck or two available for charitable use). Later, we got by with a series of fifth-hand wrecks which were constantly breaking down. But eventually my parents felt financially emboldened enough to contemplate the purchase of a new car.

There then followed weeks of intensive discussion. Should it be a Fiat (there was a new Fiat dealership in Donegal). Or should we buy British? In the end, my Dad decided that we would get a Morris Minor 1000. On Maundy Thursday he set off for Dublin, having deposited us with our grandparents in the one-horse town in Mayo where they lived. He had decided that he would drive down in the new car (complete with a ‘Running In’ sign) the following day. The roads, he explained, would be quiet.

Good Friday dawned sunny and warm. I was up early and I spent the day on the street waiting with mounting excitement for the arrival of this marvellous new acquisition. The town slept in the sunshine, like a Mexican backwater in siesta time. Not a creature stirred, except for the odd dog. The clock crept round to 3pm, when we would be dragged off to church by my (ultra devout) mother. No sign of Dad. Never had the doleful rituals in the church seemed so interminable. But eventually they came to an end. We came out into the late afternoon sunshine. And there, outside the church, stood Da, next to his gleaming black car. It was the kind of moment one never, ever forgets. And to this day I can remember that strange ‘new car’ smell.

We had that Morris Minor for years and years. What amazes me now is that we often made long family trips in it — three or fours hours at a time with two adults, four kids, a dog and all our luggage. Many decades later Sue and I used to have difficulty fitting three small kids and ourselves into large Swedish saloons. How did we fit in to that Morris Minor all those years ago? Why didn’t we complain? These are puzzles whose solutions are now lost in the mists of time.

Official harassment of amateur photographers

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Here’s a partial list of relevant links about how officialdom is treating amateur snappers.

From The Register.

  • Yes, you have rights • The Register Yes, you have rights — unless the police say you haven’t.
  • You’re all al-Qaeda suspects now.
  • So, what can you photograph?
  • New terror guidelines on photography.
  • Photocops: Home Office Concedes Concern.

    • Hansard

    Austin Mitchell’s Early Day Motion.

    Text reads:

    “That this house is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which police, Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography, and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious grounds such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.”

    Guide to UK Photographers’ Rights (pdf download of a Guide by lawyer Linda Macpherson.)

    The fickleness of the ‘attention economy’

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    Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman have done a fascinating study which seems to undermine the theory that in order to succeed in the YouTube ecosystem you need to be a prolific and persistent uploader.

    The Abstract of their paper reads:

    A hallmark of the attention economy is the competition for the attention of others. Thus people persistently upload content to social media sites, hoping for the highly unlikely outcome of topping the charts and reaching a wide audience. And yet, an analysis of the production histories and success dynamics of 10 million videos from \texttt{YouTube} revealed that the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold. This paradoxical result is further compounded by the fact that the average quality of submissions does increase with the number of uploads, with the likelihood of success less than that of playing a lottery.

    The researchers (who work at HP Labs in Palo Alto), studied the hit rates of 10 million videos uploaded by 600,000 users before 30 April 2008 and classified as a ‘success’ any video that came among the top 1% of those viewed.

    Their finding is that “the more frequently an individual uploads content the less likely it is that it will reach a success threshold.” Why? “When a producer submits several videos over time, their novelty and hence their appeal to a wide audience tends to decrease.”

    So why do people persist in the face of declining audience figures? Wu and Huberman argue that they are like gamblers, who tend to overestimate the chance of winning when the probabilities are small. (Note: professional gamblers don’t operate like that.)

    I think this misinterprets the biggest driving force behind user-generated content: the fact that people like being creative, and when technology (like YouTube) provides them with an outlet for their creativity, then they use it. ‘Success’ in Wu’s and Huberman’s terms is nice; but it’s not necessarily what it’s all about.

    Ageing gracefully

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    Lovely post in the Nicci French Blog

    I just got back from doing the coast-to-coast bike ride, Whitehaven to Tyneside, with my stepson. I do a lot of exercise, regularly, relentlessly, grimly. He doesn’t do much at all, except as a by-product of something else. Over three days of cycling, I was in more pain day by day, and he was in less pain day by day. And now I feel pain in many muscles, joints and tendons, while his body has already forgotten all about it.

    The words of the Leonard Cohen song keep coming in to my mind:

    “Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey,

    I ache in the places where I used to play.”

    Beautiful ride, though.