In this story you quote the police as claiming

"[police] have the authority, under the Police and Criminal Evident Act, to seize the camera"

while just yesterday you said:

"Police should be well aware that they have no powers to remove cameras or take film without a court order."

apparently based on this quote from Nottinghamshire police / ACPO:

"Police officers do not have the authority to prevent a person taking a photograph or to confiscate cameras or film, and such conduct could result in criminal, civil or diciplinary action. "

So which is it?

.. given the explosion in the number of cameras out there, and their more and more frequent use, that photographers are getting more and more harassment.

I think I have the solution, though. Al you need is a friend to stand vaguely in front of the bus, child, or high-security defense establishment; you can then claim to be photoing the friend instead. Take two with the friend in different places and merge the two to get a friend-free image!

I suspect what is supposedly "suspicious" about these harassed photographers is that they are alone (also tis easier to harass an individual than a pair or a group).

So imagine you are a policeman, keen to prevent terrorists from blowing up buses, trains or buildings.

You stop a dodgy looking photographer in order to search through his pictures and establish whether there is any evidence that he "is or has been concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism" (text from the Act).

How do you tell intent from the pictures? He hasn't yet printed them out and scrawled ("bomb here", "escape this way") in red marker pen. Do you hope that his memory card still has pictures from his recent trip to an Afghanistan training camp, with him and his mates firing AK-47s in the air?

This law is only "useful" in that it provides an arbitrary reason to arrest and detain someone, or have a quick perv at pictures they took of their wife last night.

Idiots.

"the officer will first discuss the matter with the photographer"

Well unless this is weasel-speak for "threaten the photographer and demand personal information, proof of innocence and destruction of (intellectual) property", that's a load of shite, isn't it?

If it IS weasel for that, I ought to apologise to weasels: they'd choke on this sort of crap.

I'm sure I've heard the term unlawful arrest used in relation to events in the UK. What is one of these if the police has the 'authority' to arrest someone because they happen to be bored.

As for what the chap had on his camera in Ponty, I'm guessing it's what we call a Welsh Rarebit. A Valleys bus (yes I'm from the Valleys and have memories of regularly giving up and walking a mile to the train station. It still worked out quicker and more reliable).

They run on the hour,

Every hour,

Give or take an hour,

If you're lucky.

Second that A C - What are our rights?

I think I’d make a stand and go to the Police Station and be charged than just hand over my personal possessions - if the law says they need a warrant. (and they have not got one) that is.

BTW if any of you have cameras with telephoto lenses don't visit beaches in New South Wales Australia - you are assumed to be paedophile or pervert and if you have a green laser pointer don’t bring it to Australia - they are classed as deadly weapons (it's OK to own a shotgun though)

If you get yourself arrested then pretty well anything on your person becomes fair game for the police. The police certianly do not have the power to confiscate any form of property, whether photographic or anything else, unless you are arrested. The real issue then becomes whether you are suspected of committing an indictable offense. That is essentially an offense which requires a preliminary hearing to establish if there is a prima facia case to answer in a court of law.

The real question then becomes whether the arrest on suspicion is made on reasonable grounds. Given the wide-ranging nature of much of the anti-terrorism legislation, then there's a lot of discretion in the hands of the boys in blue, especially around anything that might be considered sensitive - which frankly might include any number of things in a city centre. Transport centres, buses, local government buildings - who knows.

"...they have the authority, under the Police and Criminal Evident Act, to seize the camera and arrest the individual."

If they arrest you, they take the camera as evidence.

Yesterdays article dealt with the Police trying to take the Camera film without arresting the person.

To do this they need a court order.

Well, it was a "Gloucestershire Police spokeswoman" that said "under the Police and Criminal Evident Act, to seize the camera and arrest the individual."

That doesn't mean that the Gloucestershire Police spokeswoman actually knows what the law is, and is just making things up because she, along with lots of Police officers, think the Police have more powers than have been granted to them.

I'm hoping I get stopped by the police for taking photographs soon, so I can get the letter from the Chief Constable apologising to me, so I can keep it in my camera bag for the future.

Now that's going to get a lot of us arrested.

Apart from the ultra-cheap digitals and the mobile phones, they all have zoom lenses which get into the telephoto range.

The police get to take your fingerprints & DNA sample - don't they? Who needs to worry about ID cards when the state can acquire all the info it needs this way.

Sorry, silly me. Of course, under the current legislation the information cannot be shared so it's quite secure on the PNC

What other little tricks does the state have planned.

I don't think I have anything to hide but ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.

What if the shotgun has a green laser target pointer?

That'll make for Schrödinger's shotgun with all kinds of interesting results.

By and by, the UK sinks lower and lower on my "places to go to" list. Which is a shame, as I know so many nice people from around there.

Right... what about if we organise for groups of us to flood town centres with photographers taking photographs of buses, court buildings, police stations and railway stations? We could even take turns to phone up the police and report each other for acting in a suspicious manner...

It's an interesting world when train (ok, bus), spotters are considered dangerous.

firstly, while easy to ridicule 'geeks' and their hobbies, It can often be only with hindsight that people see the value of their geekish activity as in time it can form a valuable historical and social document not of interest to the mass media of the day. The likes of Ivo Peters spring to mind who spent much of his life photographing and filming what was then contemporary public transport. Most noteably planes and trains. The collection he built up throughout his life is now considered to be of historic value. The collection of 16mm colour films he shot of the now defunct Somerset and Dorset line back in the days of steam has been the subject of a BBC TV series.

The other point was that its not that long ago that the Greek Authorities were ridiculed for similar over reaction to a group of British planespotters.

'now we have terrorist paedophiles'

Osama Bin Kiddyfiddlin ?

How I read the story was that he felt it would be reasonably easy to remove the terrorist label, (duh, I've just got an odd hobby) whereas once labelled a paedophile he was going to be in the shit for the rest of his life arising from "he's a bit different from the rest of us" together with that well known libertarian principle "there's no smoke without fire"

Have we all forgotten the paediatrician that was persecuted because none of the mob could get past the first four letters?

"Yep, cos fiddling with kids is much, much worse than blowing them up."

Because we all know the great unwashed masses think with that kind of rational.

I think we ran headlong into a surveillance state quite some time ago, and with the current levels of paranoia out there, not necessarily whipped up by the media, but by politicians who are using it to push the population control agenda. Or am I being paranoid?

There is loads of this in Amateur Photographer at the moment - it's even taken over from the tired and dusty digital v film "debate" that's been knocking around for far too long. The police are cracking down on old boys taking photos of buses or taking street scene photos while at the same time asking for photographers to come forward with photographic evidence of street crime. Tom Harris, MP, wanted to know why there is a malaise in this country, well maybe he would do well to start looking into the perceived or real liberties that we have lost over the last few years - councils using RIPA to spy on citizens for trivial offences, police coming down hard on people carrying on with legal hobbies, ID cards and more importantly the central database being forced on people, the police DNA database that is almost impossible to be removed from, fingerprinting kids so they can take out library books, the list is pretty endless and is quite apart from the fact that the economy isn't much cop at the moment. How did it go in '97 - things can only get better? I bought into it at the time, how wrong I was.

Well, I'm looking forward to doing a bit of outdoor photography myself in a couple of weeks, but I'm going to pop over to Canada to do it where the RCMP have a bit more common sense.

I'm finished now. Sorry.

When our civil rights have been eroded to this state then its time to acknowledge that there is little point in fighting terrorists to "protect our freedoms" when the Police state is taking away our rights to be honest, law-abiding, up-standing citizens faster than any terrorist actions could ever do.

In the last 5 days I've been caught no less than 3 times by the Google street view car carefully mapping and photographing everything in our area.

Can I complain to plod and have the Google street-mapping car confiscated?

All a vaguely bright terrorist planning to bomb a building has to do is

Keep moving so as to be well away before someone can complain to the police, even assuming there are police nearby

(As suggested earlier) take pictures of his mates (possibly in silly tourist hats) posing in front of sensitive buildings

Take pictures covertly (presumably not hard to do successfully given the possibilities of checking digital results and then re-trying)

Use video - make film of accomplices walking down street, easy to take brief excursions to include target buildings which you can grab as stills from the video later

Take photographs/video from a moving vehicle

etc

or just the old-fashioned method of using their eyes, possibly making a sketch later if they feel the need.

You'd *think* that someone capable of looking at photographs of buildings and working out how to attack them would probably be capable of doing the assessment about as well by being there, and unless the place was *so* sensitive that a dawdling pedestrian would be suspect to the point of detention, if they perceived much risk of being caught taking photographs, they'd just not take photographs.

Apart from people blowing up car-bombs outside (which surely doesn't take much precise planning of location), or walking in past defective physical security with a bomb to leave somewhere or detonate in a suicide attack, what kinds of building attack are there?

(I suppose the IRA mortar attack springs to mind, but I assume *they* could have just used a map.)

At the very best, curtailing photography just seems to be a significant pain for many regular citizens, which might make things fractionally more inconvenient for a few possible terrorists.