An Metet wrote:
The person in question was just somebody with a weakness for industrial architecture.
*I've* taken pictures of oil-company installations in Houston and Galveston and points between. Who do I turn myself in to? I also walk or cycle all over London & take photos of just about everything from bridges to canals to private houses (aren't digital cameras wonderful?). No-one's bothered me ever. Though sometimes I've felt I was being a bit stupid wandering alone at night through large public housing projects openly carrying 800 quids worth of video camera.
The "no cameras" signs were very popular in east block countries. It was forbidden to take pictures of bridges, government buildings, airports, railway stations, industrial installations, water dams etc.
Back in the 1970s I was on a camping holiday in what was then Yugoslavia with a friend. We arrived in Rijeka in Croatia by bus, started walking off to see if we could find a camp sight, and by the time we realised we were walking out of town the wrong way it was too late & too dark to do anything about it. So we slept on a small mound just off the road we were on. Next morning we saw that we were on what was basically a rubbish dump, overlooking the naval harbour, with a great view of all sorts of military activities. No-one seemed to be taking any notice of us though. [...]
In a depressingly predictable manner US of A is sliding into the same mode of operation. And, depressingly, it works. Expect more manufactured everyday threats, more citizen-informants, the works. Contracting or subcontracting airborne demolition artists is not practical on ongoing basis ... we need a terrorist threat everywhere, every day.
In 1990 I and some colleagues were visiting a Texaco office in Houston for a work-related meeting. In the carpark we began to take some pictures of each other with the office building as background. The carpark attendant came up and demanded we stop insisting that there no photographs could be taken of the building. Not even an industrial location, just a high-rise office building in a Houston suburb (Bellaire), in full & close view of the street, some other commercial buildings, and dozens, if not hundreds, of private homes, and distantly visible to thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of people every day. Crazy authoritarianism. Rules for the sake of rules. They exist to show who is boss. Like school uniforms or corporate dress codes - the rule is made not to enforce any desirable behaviour but to show who is where in the the hierarchy, who is able to make rules and who has to obey them.