Please don't photograph shitty public transport The Guardian's been getting lots of references lately from your friendly bastards here at BoE. Not wanting this blog to be labelled as a "mirror" blog of the Guardian website, I can't help but credit the good ol' chaps there for receiving and posting lots of good clips lately particularly of police behaviour caught on civilian camera. Inverse surveillance as they say. Clearly the effects of this sudden online growth of documentation seems a distant relative to those observed moments before the death of Rovian politics.

Today the Guardian reports another peculiar case of the upstanding Met police deleting two tourists' holiday photos in London. Seriously, you can't make this sh*t up.

Like most visitors to London, Klaus Matzka and his teenage son Loris took several photographs of some of the city's sights, including the famous red double-decker buses. More unusually perhaps, they also took pictures of the Vauxhall bus station, which Matzka regards as "modern sculpture".

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

In a letter in today's Guardian, Matzka wrote: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists?"

The Metropolitan police said it was investigating the allegations.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

- From the Guardian

You can trust my experience when I say that tourists, who have any positive impression left of this country when passing through immigration's prozac'd officers, might usually be expected to take a number of photos whilst in their visiting country. Particularly outdoors. Particularly with some sort of infrastructure in the background. In fact, it may come as a shocker to the officer to discover EVERYTHING is on Google these days.

Of course now Klaus says he is turned off from ever returning to the UK. Just what the economy and tourism industry needs right now... fewer tourists! The offcers did a fantastic job at protecting the citizens from terrorism whilst proving what the best idiot fashion is as such.

It really depends on whether you value the physical integrity of your brain or your sense of hearing.  ¶ posted by Jon at 4/16/2009