We photographers are all guilty

I read at the weekend about a Dutchman, Frank Doorhof, who was taking a photo of his wife in a Coventry shopping centre when a security guard approached him and demanded that the delete the images he had taken. Mr Doorhof is a fashion photographer and so probably had a nice camera and in my experience the police and security people do tend to pick on those of us with good cameras rather than snappers. Why I do not know as my second camera is a compact with a 12x zoom and decent quality imaging. But I digress, the centre management explained the incident thus:

"It's on government advice under the Terrorism Act that people could be taking photographs within public buildings and then using them for unscrupulous means which puts everybody at risk."

I think the key word here is 'could', yes they could but equally they could be doing the same taking photos on their iPhone or similar, or people might just be taking photos of their wife, husband or children OR even in a supposedly free country of an interesting building or anything at all.

It is odd how much energy goes into stopping the law-abiding from leading a normal life whilst the potential terrorists are left alone.