Stumbling off the Eurostar at St Pacras, I pass through the third passport check of the journey. This one has a motley gaggle of officials, some in blue jackets and some in white shirts. A man in a blue jacket glances at my passport and waves me through.
“Is that filming, sir?” says a white shirted woman.
“Huh?” I mumble.
“Is that filming?” She points. I look down, and notice my camcorder in my hand.
“No,” I say, feeling indignant that I would even be asked.
“Can I see?”
I hold out my camcorder. She makes a show of checking it. To really tell if it’s filming you have to open the screen or look through the viewfinder. She does neither. She waves me on.
“Would it have been a problem it was? Isn’t it allowed?”
“You’re not allowed to film in a control zone,” she explains.
“I bet you’re filming us!” I don’t say, my self preservation instincts kicking in.
What is it about this incident that riles me so much? Is it that I’ve never heard of a control zone and resent the expectation that I understand its rules? I do, but that is not the reason. Is it that I feel threatened by the criminalisation of bumbling tourists who forget they have left their cameras on? I am, but that is not the reason.
No, it’s that some people get to act all superior bossing others about to no useful end and the Universe (via my taxes) rewards them for it. Why can’t they get real jobs?
I once got my camera out and took a photograph of an immigration checkpoint at Waterloo. Someone in uniform came up to me and said something like “I don’t have to tell you that photography is not allowed here”, worded in such a way that he seemed to be implying that the reasons for such a rule were so obvious as to require no explanation. (He was perfectly polite, though, and did not ask me to delete the photograph I had already taken). I was tempted to ask him why, as in truth I can see no good reason for the rule, but that would have involved challenging his mindset more than he probably wanted it challenged. Also, I was at the beginning of my journey, and it is easier for officials to inconvenience you at the start of a journey than the end, because they can simply prevent you from travelling. (I saw an amusing example of this in Paris once, where a couple of drunk Englishmen were gratuitously rude to a French official, who proceeded to detain them until a minute after their train left, after which he let them go).
The trouble with such laws is that they reduce accountancy of officials. If people can be filmed and photographed as they do their jobs and they are not doing their jobs properly, people may have cold and hard evidence that they are not doing their jobs properly. If is is just “my word against his”, and “he” is some foreigner, then they can get away with a lot more than if they are under more scrutiny. “Security” regulations can do a wonderful job of hiding corruption and incompetence.
Thanks for the comment, Michael. Your point about officials not being photographed reminded me of the time I heard an announcement on the London Underground to the effect that photography was not allowed for privacy reasons. Someone has a sense of humour.