John Menick

Much to the relief of many New Yorkers, the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting decided to scrap its proposal to revise the city’s photography and permit laws. Inundated with stories from artists, journalists, amateur shutterbugs, concerned citizens, bloggers, libertarians, bird watchers, filmmakers, and regular folks, someone made a decent call downtown and backed off one of the most absurd proposals concerning public space in recent memory.

However, I have to say that I’m not confident that this will blip off our radar any time soon. The city is only proposing to redraft a new law, not back away from it entirely. It may be typical politics: test the waters with something outrageous, and scale back until people get tired of fighting or the city gets what it wanted in the first place. My feeling is that the NYPD just wants another excuse to search citizens, and there are plenty of ways to help facilitate that project. A watered-down version of the proposed legislation might do just fine.

Also of note: the above Times article mentions bird watcher D. Bruce Yolton and his website Urban Hawks. As I learned a couple of weeks ago from one of my commenters, in recent years birders all over the city have been unfairly targeted by police. Perhaps not unhappily, it’s been an unintended benefit of the legislation that so many people are learning about the rich and extremely vital NYC bird-watching community.

And then there’s also that awesome video.

As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”

Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.

One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”

Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”

Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?

I’m elated that the Dems won back the Congress, but I’m skeptical whether it will help close or even reform places like Guantánamo. As the Miami Herald writes, perhaps Rumsfeld’s departure will help even more. Then again, can it get any worse than US officials denying access to their clients? From AP:

“If attorneys were kept from visiting Guantanamo, the only information regarding conditions there would be provided by the government,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a New York lawyer whose Bahraini client tried to commit suicide at Guantánamo last year as Colangelo-Bryan was visiting him.

(Also see Amnesty’s page on the detention center, and their new project, Make Some Noise.)

Blogger and architect Raed Jarrar was flying to California through JFK wearing an Artists Against the War t-shirt that said “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English. JetBlue’ response?

One of the two men who approached me first, Inspector Harris, asked for my id card and boarding pass. I gave him my boarding pass and driver’s license. He said “people are feeling offended because of your t-shirt”. I looked at my t-shirt: I was wearing my shirt which states in both Arabic and English “we will not be silent”. You can take a look at it in this picture taken during our Jordan meetings with Iraqi MPs. I said “I am very sorry if I offended anyone, I didnt know that this t-shirt will be offensive”. He asked me if I had any other T-shirts to put on, and I told him that I had checked in all of my bags and I asked him “why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn’t it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?” The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said “people here in the US don’t understand these things about constitutional rights”. So I answered him “I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt”.

More from Raed Jarrar and Democracy Now.