strat writes "Both DCist and the War On Photography blogs have articles about recent inanity (or is that insanity?) ensuing at Union Station in Washington, D.C. when local security or staff apparatchiks have noted that most insidious of activities... snapping pictures of your loved ones when seeing them off to the train.
As both photography enthusiasts and railfans know, there is a growing climate of intolerance of perfectly innocent photographic pursuits, coupled with an epidemic of functionaries intent on wrongly stating laws and regulations surrounding photography.
Amtrak is particularly inconsistent, when one contrasts the experiences people have had at the hands of overzealous security and conductor personnel and the fact that they have annual photo contests!
Washington's Union Station is a "public/private" partnership of sorts, with LaSalle, the building management company, exercising control over the shopping mall areas, and Amtrak, a taxpayer-funded "quasi-private" government monopoly, operating the train-related areas. Oh yes, and to add to the mix, there's also a Metro station in there, operated by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
It turns out that despite the fact that the laws are consistent through all of these areas (No U.S. law prohibits photographing a train.), there is not only a widely divergent set of rules within this building but differences even within Amtrak's management staff as to whether innocuous shutterbugs are to be regarded as evildoers.
The building management company seems to discourage photography within the shopping mall area of Union Station. If one calls Amtrak, the Station Manager will apparently tell you all photography is verboten without a permit, while the Amtrak Media/Corporate Relations department says that non-commercial photography is definitely allowed and that station managers and others shouldn't incorrectly advise one otherwise.
The Amtrak web site indicates that news media/commercial photographers are required to request permission to ply their trade, but is silent on hobbyist picture-taking.
Despite incidents like this on Metro you're ok to take pictures in the Metro subway system, including the Union Station stop, though the Pentagon Station is apparently specifically placarded to forbid them.
As some have noted in other fora, it would be a bad time to be Henri Cartier-Bresson. At this rate future citizens may be deprived of their own equivalent to D�rriere la gare Saint-Lazare.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but Bert P. Krages II is. He has produced a very useful summary of the legalities of photography in the U.S., suitable for printing and handing to all manner of grumpies. "
Thanks, strat! The genius of the American Constitution -- the thing that made it new and fresh and different (to me) lies in its recognition of our freedom. It doesn't carve out a certain zone of freedom in the world and give it to us -- rather it carves out exceptions to our freedom, gives those to the State, and then says:
Amendment 9. The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment 10. The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The reason this is so important is precisely the bureaucratic impulse we see above, to treat our freedoms as something inherently limited. Not so. It's the power of the state that's inherently limited -- the fact that certain rights are enumerated doesn't give bureaucrats the right to limit all the others. Much as they might like to.
We've dealt with some of this before but I'm glad to see more movement on this issue -- the more people know and point, the more bureaucrats tend to withdraw.
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