Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Paranoia in Arlington

From a random person trying to take a photograph of an unmarked building in a busy neighborhood near a Metro station comes a fun Stalinist experience, courtesy the US Government and the Arlington police department:

Officer Malara stopped to take information from a friend and I on the grounds that he observed us taking photographs in a “high security area.” And by “taking photographs in a ‘high security area’” I mean being in possession of a camera while walking down the street opposite several blocks of non-descript office buildings, less than a block from the Virginia Square-GMU Metro station.

The level of paranoid stupidity that is demonstrated by the police in this case is absurd. Just because someone could use a camera to take a picture of a random office building¹ for some nefarious deed does not mean that there is any probability that they will do so. Someone might purchase bleach to help destroy the evidence of a murder, but that doesn’t mean everyone purchasing bleach should be questioned. There are substantially better uses of time.

The only thing this policy, if one can call something so ill-conceived and asinine a policy, accomplishes is to attempt to instill an Orwellian fear in the populace of doing anything that might, based on the whims of some random bureaucrat’s idol fantasies, insight the police to question them. It is simply yet another step in the quelling of the sheep to keep them as docile as possible. Just for entertainment, I think it’s time to start taking pictures of random buildings.

¹ The address of DARPA’s HQ is well published, and hardly a secret.