For This, I'm On The List 3

Lots of people have stories of altercations with the authorities while taking fotos...for this pic here's my story - when-they-take-me-away-call the ACLU...

Over at the ThomasHawk site, I recently saw this story - Photographer Held For Hours By Police - and thought nothing of it at the time. Now, I read it with an entirely new understanding…

In comparison, though, my story is very tame. Today, at lunch, I happened to drive by an office building with the most beautiful array of Tulips out front. I stopped, grabbed the camera, left the motor running, quickly walked over and took the above picture.

Ya gotta admit, those sure are beautiful flowers. I especially like the solitary white one.

By the time I had taken the third picture, I had a security guard standing next to me. He asked for my name. I asked him politely if I had done something wrong. He then informed me that two important and discrete government organizations (he named the specific three initials of both...one started with a C, the other a D) had offices in that building…and that "they" had told him to go and get my information.

I immediately and VERY politely handed over my drivers license and tried to smile at him. I asked him if I was going to have to hand over the camera…or delete the images. I asked him if he wanted to see the fotos I had taken. I mentioned that all I had done was take the pictures of the flowers.

He looked at me sternly and said that he had confiscated cameras in the past, but that he wasn't going to take mine. He had seen exactly what I had done and didn't need to see the fotos. But, he continued, if I had taken a picture of the building, things would be different.

He handed back my ID and I VERY politely thanked him. Then I walked to my vehicle.

Now I'm on a list.

There is no sign on the building that would indicate who has offices within. In fact, it's a fairly nondescript office building…surrounded by other generic office buildings. So, it was just my dumb luck, I guess.

Or, they put those flowers out there for entrapment…