Clive sent me this update from The Register:
The Metropolitan Police has issued guidance to its officers to remind them that using a camera in public is not in itself a terrorist offence.
There has been increasing concern in recent months that police have been over-using terrorism laws and public order legislation to harass professional and amateur photographers. The issue was raised in Parliament and the Home Office agreed to look at the rules.
The guidance reminds officers that the public do not need a licence to take photographs in the street and the police have no power to stop people taking pictures of anything they like, including police officers.
The over-used Terrorism Act of 2000 does not ban photography either, although it does allow police to look at images on phones or cameras during a search to see if they could be useful to a terrorist.
This is a belated follow-up to incidents like this one (oh, and this one, too). It’s refreshing to see that at least one government recognizes that recent police enforcement of a non-existant law must be curtailed. It’s also sad that this sort of thing is still so rare as to be noteworthy.
Oh, and Canadians shouldn’t try to be smug about this . . . we have over-enthusiastic police enforcement of mythical laws as well.
(Cross-posted to the old blog, http://bolditalic.com/quotulatiousness_archive/005569.html.)
