Secret Buildings You May Not Photograph, Part 643
If you happen by 3701 N. Fairfax Drive in Arlington and decide you have
a sudden craving for a photograph of a generic suburban office building,
and you point your camera at said structure, you will rather quickly be
greeted by uniformed security folks who will demand that you delete the
image and require that you give up various personal information.
When Keith McCammon unwittingly took a picture of that building, he was
launched on an odyssey that has so far involved an Arlington police
officer, the chief of police and the defense of the United States of
America.
McCammon could not have been expected to know when he wandered by the
building that it houses the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a
low-profile wing of the Defense Department that conducts all manner of
high-tech research that evolves into weapons systems and high-order
strategery.
DARPA's presence at 3701 N. Fairfax is hardly a government
secret--Google finds nearly 10,000 pages listing the agency's use of the
building. But there's no big fat sign on the building, so how was
McCammon to know that this was a building he dared not photograph? And
why would the government care if anyone took a picture of the exterior
of an office building? This is as silly and hypersensitive as the
now-common harassment of people who innocently take pictures of random
federal buildings in the District.
McCammon decided to fight back. He demanded to know why he had been
stopped, why the government needed his personal information, and why any
record of the incident should be kept in government records. He got
quick, polite responses from Arlington officials.
"I hope that you would agree that the security of any such building is
of great im****tance and every law enforcement officer is duty bound to
investigate all suspicious activity," wrote Arlington Acting Police
Chief Daniel Murray. "I am certainly not implying that a person taking
photographs is inherently 'suspicious,' but when the appearance is that
the subject of a photograph is a government installation, officers have
a duty to ensure the safety of the occupants of this structure."
Hmmm. Any government installation? This overly broad approach to
security is why we end up with ridiculous horror stories about innocent
tourists getting hassled for taking photos of the Lincoln Memorial or
the Department of the Interior. The good news here is that Arlington
police didn't take a re****t or create a file on McCammon. The bad news
is that they did pass his information along to "the internal security
agency for this installation." Which means that somewhere in the vast
security apparatus that we have constructed since 9/11--utterly ignoring
the fact that the Soviet empire collapsed under the weight of its own
paranoid security apparatus--there is now a re****t on Keith McCammon,
photographer.
The bottom line is that McCammon was caught in a classic logical trap.
If he had only known the building was off-limits to photographers, he
would have avoided it. But he was not allowed to know that fact.
"Reasonable, law-abiding people tend to avoid these types of things when
it can be helped," McCammon wrote. "Thus, my request for a list of
locations within Arlington County that are unmarked, but at which
photography is either prohibited or discouraged according to some
(public or private) policy. Of course, such a list does not exist.
Catch-22."
The only antidote to this security mania is sun****ne. Only when more and
more Americans do as McCammon has done and take the time and effort to
chronicle these excesses and insist on answers from authorities will we
stand a chance of restoring balance and sanity to the blend of liberty
and security that we are madly remixing in these confused times.
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