Over on Farber’s IP list, Simon Phipps sent in another sobering note about our eroding freedoms, pointing to a blog entry entitled Aerial Photography Considered Harmful:
“On my recent trip back from India on British Airways, I was inspired by Julieanne Kost’s recent book, Window Seat…to snap some landscape photos at 35000 feet. I think we were over Iran at the time. After taking several shots, imagine my surprise when one of the BA attendants closed the window shade and informed me that it was against British Airways policy for passengers to take such photos for security reasons. I thought she was kidding, but the head attendant confirmed what I had been told. And that it had nothing to do with where we were flying.”
(While I cited this entry because of the civil liberties implications, you should check out the blog entry. The images Josh Simons snapped before he was stopped are stunning. (For that matter, so are Julianne’s images in the book, incidentally published by O’Reilly.))