Posted on 10/08/2012 8:42:36 AM PDT by Altariel
A man who snapped photos of a brewing storm last month received a visit Friday from an FBI Agent, inquiring why he would want to take such photos.
Michael Galindo explained that he was simply volunteering for the National Weather Service.
And FBI Agent David Pileggi seemed to be satisfied with that response.
But Galindo was left wondering whether he now has a permanent FBI file.
“He told me, ‘you’re not a threat and you are doing a public service but just be careful next time,’” Galindo said in a telephone interview with Photography is Not a Crime.
The problem arose because Galindo happened to be taking photos near the Lyondell Refinery outside of Houston on September 13, even though he was never standing on the refinery’s property.
Someone from the refinery spotted him and called police, whom apparently arrived after he had left.
Police then contacted the local FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, which bills itself as “nation’s front line on terrorism.”
“I was pretty freaked out when he came but I had no idea what it was about,” said the 26-year-old man. “The worst thing I’ve done is get speeding tickets, but I haven’t gotten one in three years.
“He said I was spotted near the refinery but I couldn’t even remember doing that. I thought it had to be somebody else.
“It wasn’t until he mentioned my camera that I made the connection.”
Galindo told the agent that he volunteers for a NWS program called Skywarn that trains citizens to monitor the weather in the name of “protecting lives and property.”
He said when he pulled off to the side of the road and began taking photos of a brewing storm and potential tornados, he didn’t even notice the refinery, but made sure there weren’t any “no parking” signs around.
“I told him I had been looking for a clear line of site and I had found it,” he said.
Although Pileggi seemed a little surprised by that response, he pulled out a three-page document and began asking questions off it, inquiring whether Galindo had ever been in the military or had ever traveled overseas and about what schools he had attended in the past.
“I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything,” Galindo said.
The 20-minute visit took place less than a week after a scathing report was released on the inefficiency and ineptitude on urban fusion centers, such as the Miami-Dade Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau, which was monitoring my Facebook page because of my blog, as well as the Houston fusion center, which produced a video depicting photographers as terrorists.
Joint Terrorism Task Forces are a little different than fusion centers but they both operate under the Department of Homeland Security and are under the assumption photographers are terrorists.
Next you need to read (or reread) It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis.
I may have to side with the FBI on this, because we are at war and America had agents taking pictures of key locations during WW2, and they too gave innocent reasons.
Better to err on the side of caution than to defend some bozo who had nothing better to do than gaze at clouds.
For those that still want to defend this guy be glad you are on the web and not withing arm reach of me.
Heap big mighty brave keyboard warrior* I suggest you read the constitution (probably for the first time) and get a grip as to what this country is about.
*Translates as "blowhard a$$hole"
I have a video I took while at Disneyland years ago, it was of an Arab looking person who was filming people, and how he later followed me and my family taking our pictures. He saw me taking an interest in him while he was filming people.
It was so scary I had to shorten our stay at the parks, now you still want to preach about rights?
You bet your backside I do. First off the guy was probably a perv rather than a terrorist considering what sorts are attracted to disney enterprises.
But secondly and far more importantly, you and every other citizen is at far greater risk from the loss of freedom by expanding the police powers of the government. Look at what happens to citizens when they abdicate personal responsibility to the government - The DDR, USSR, Cambodia, Nazi Germany, China under Mao, any number of African countries, Turkey, etc. Far more citizens have been murdered by their own governments in the last hundred years or so than were killed by any number of foreign attacks. We started down this road years ago with Waco and Ruby Ridge. Today if a cop kills a citizen it is extremely unlikely that the cop will face any consequences for that action, so I think it is far better to take some extremely slight risk that someone photographing a facility has some bad motivation that the further advance the police powers of the state.
May your chains rest on you lightly.
“It would boil down to if the person, in Public, in a crowd of other people had a reasonable expectation of privacy.”
*chuckle* We had a young lady show up at the helpdesk who wanted to see if we could get an off-campus, private website to take her picture down. Seems a few nights before, their hockey/baseball/whatever team had won/lost (I can’t be bothered to remember) and the students drank, rioted, burned dorm furniture, drank, broke windows, started bonfires, and drank. The young lady in question had, while sitting on her boyfriend’s (?) shoulders, removed her shirt — this while camera flashes had ALREADY been going off for a while. (There was video of the riot.)
The www.school-name-drunk.com site graciously took her photo down. Sober, she understood that we couldn’t force them to and that she had little expectation of (shirtless) privacy in a riot. Still, she worried “What if my parents see it?”
Other states’ laws may vary...
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