Photography of Police Outlawed in UK

Britain already has more CCTV surveillance than any other country on the planet. Wherever you go in the UK, you can safely assume that the police are watching you, filming you, or taking pictures of you.

Now the British Parliament is working to pass a law making it illegal to photograph or videotape the police.

I'm not comfortable with the word 'facism' since it is so frequently thrown about without any reference to the actual meaning of the term. But I'm hard pressed to think that this law isn't overtly so.

This is an extremely dangerous law, no matter how you cut it. When citizens are banned from filming arrests or street protests, the door is open for widespread police misbehavior.

Of course, ultimately people will still film the police. Probably an entire underground network will spring up with that express goal.

The next evolution in cell phone camera recording is direct-to-web. Once people can film using a cell phone, and the video is directly uploaded live to the internet, confiscating a camera will become a moot point.

Moore's Law ensures that camera technology will increasingly become more compact and less expensive. Tiny cameras that can be hidden in a hat brim or a coat button are already on the market, and will become even more prevalent - until they too are outlawed in the UK.

So far Canada seems to have a good, healthy perspective on public photography, but who knows how long that will last.

There's a bill in the US Congress -- unlikely to go anywhere -- to force digital cameras to go "click." The idea is that this will make surreptitious photography harder. "The bill's text says that Congress has found that 'children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.'"

This is so silly it defies comment.

But, apparently it is already law in Japan.