Pixiq

what most folks don’t get over here is that they have no First Amendment in the UK or in most European countries.

No matter how brilliantly an idea is stated, we will not really be moved unless we have already half-thought of it ourselves.What do you think?
curt
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The individual woman is required... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.It is well observed by Rankin.
curt
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I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence well said by Frederick.
curt
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oh I get it all right. The reason I blog about the UK is that their government has a lot of influence on our government and vice versa.

@ Cigar: we don’t have a single codified document like the States but there are written protections like the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus Act, Bill of Right.. etc.. etc.. (as an aside, we *used* to be able to bare arms in defence.. I didn’t know that)

On topic… what’s more worrying is the legislation that’s being passed that will allow the authorities the abilities to stop people in the street for *no* reason (I can’t find the links right now), although there are *supposed* to be limitations on the reasons to search you can bet the police will find some in addition to using S44 as a catch all (when it’s not supposed to be used like that). God help you if you get stopped, searched and a camera revealed…

Here we go, BBC article from Jan 09;

It looks like it’s limited to ‘marked’ areas but there probably won’t be any check/balances in place about where and how those are set up.

There’s also a call to “get rid of red tape” which then also removes accountability regarding abusing the system.

by “marked areas” I guess they’ll post signs as a warning? maybe it’s time to get out those Leicas and start shooting from the hip again.

Last year, police in the UK were given the right to set their own restrictions regarding photography, thus allowing them to interpret the law, not just enforce the law.

http://carlosmiller.com/2008/07/06/uk-police-allowed-to-set-their-own-re...

Now with this law, which puts photographers on the same level as terrorists, we can only imagine how police are going to enforce this law.

Or even how the judges will approach these cases.

This is a huge, huge setback not just for photographers but for civil libertarians in general.

It basically means that if you take a picture of a cop, and they don’t like your attitude about it, you can wind up in prison for ten years.

The former director of the M15, which is UK’s version of the CIA, believes the UK is turning into a police state.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/4643415/...

UK Law is based on common law, rather than a written constitution.

Awesome, so even though the UK is littered with CCTV cameras watching citizens’ every move, the citizens themselves aren’t allowed to photograph police? The state exists for the citizens, not the other way around.

See this film for info on the problems faced by photographers and filmmakers, ‘Policing the Public Gaze’, http://www.worldbytes.org/programmes/013/013_004.html