Photographers turn out in solidarity against new “terror law”.

Repost­ed: 16.02.2009: every­one knows Indy­medi­a’s a cop­per’s favourite read, but after a cou­ple of hun­dred snap­pers turned up out­side the yard this morn­ing they’ll be queu­ing up today to see whose mug’s on the wire.

Photographing gun copsRepost­ed: 16.02.2009: every­one knows Indy­medi­a’s a cop­per’s favourite read, but after a cou­ple of hun­dred snap­pers turned up out­side the yard this morn­ing they’ll be queu­ing up today to see whose mug’s on the wire.

Because snuck in today under the usu­al cov­er of the war against ter­ror came Sec­tion 76 of the Counter-Ter­ror­ism Act 2008.

This crim­i­nalis­es any­one ‘elic­it­ing, pub­lish­ing or com­mu­ni­cat­ing infor­ma­tion on mem­bers of the armed forces, intel­li­gence ser­vices and police offi­cers which is “like­ly to be use­ful to a per­son com­mit­ting or prepar­ing an act of ter­ror­ism”.

But giv­en the police’s reg­u­lar and bla­tant mis­use of oth­er laws such as Sec­tion 44 of the exist­ing Ter­ror­ism Act and Sec­tion 1 of PACE, pho­tog­ra­phers feel it’s a rac­ing cer­tain­ty that it’ll get used to sup­press evi­dence the police don’t want used against them.

“I can see it now”, wrote pho­tog­ra­ph­er Marc Vallee in Thurs­day’s Guardian ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/11/police-terrorism-photography-liberty-central) “If you don’t stop tak­ing pic­tures of me hit­ting this pro­test­er on the head, I’m going to nick you under sec­tion 76 of the Counter-Ter­ror­ism Act 2008.”

At least three legal cas­es are cur­rent­ly pend­ing relat­ing to such police over-exu­ber­ance at last year’s Cli­mate Camp in Kingsnorth, Kent. Almost two thou­sand cops from 26 forces assem­bled at a cost of over 6 mil­lion quid and — hav­ing first harassed and delayed the press — chose to lay in on a reg­u­lar basis on campers with steel batons.

Sad­ly for them these attacks were nev­er­the­less filmed and pho­tographed and this evi­dence stands ready to dis­prove the lies they make in jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for that behav­iour. Imag­ine how much eas­i­er life will be for them in future if those news­gath­er­ers can be tak­en away from the scene under threat of a ten year stretch.

High up behind the mir­rored win­dows of New Scot­land Yard the For­ward Intel­li­gence Team will have been at work pho­tograph­ing the pho­tog­ra­phers for their records.

And they’ll have noticed some­thing new — as well as the usu­al twen­ty or so pho­tog­ra­phers they always tar­get for “report­ing the news the wrong way” there were a cou­ple of hun­dred new faces: work­ing news pho­tog­ra­phers who’ve had it up to the back teeth with being pushed around ille­gal­ly on threat (and some­times the real­i­ty) of arrest.

It’s no longer just an activist minor­i­ty that sees through this sham of repres­sion pre­sent­ed almost as a health and safe­ty issue (keep­ing us safe from the bad men). Polit­i­cal police intru­sion is becom­ing ever more inva­sive, is affect­ing all our lives and fuck­ing up the free­doms we’re sup­posed to believe are (were?) our right.

This new law is just one more sub­tle tool in the armoury of pub­lic repres­sion and this extra­or­di­nary turnout by what is nor­mal­ly an apa­thet­ic and polit­i­cal­ly care­less bunch of pho­tog­ra­phers sends a clear sig­nal that the worm is final­ly turn­ing.