Does anyone know what the connection between photographers and terrorism is? Terrorists are avid photographers? Inside every photographer, there’s a terrorist trying to get out? 

We know from folklore (Dr. Strangelove 😉 – in the postwar period terrorists, spies and diplomats used matchbox cameras to collect evidence. Today anyone can buy a range of James Bond appropriate cameras and bugs off the internet. Hidden cameras in tie pins, hat bands and pens, they are all but invisible. But terrorists, for some inexplicable reason, don’t use these. They double-bluff. They use DSLRs on tripods. 

When you have Google Earth and StreetView, and you can get 100 times more and better info from hacking, what kind of terrorists take photos? Was it ever a realistic scenario? Or is it like London fog? The belief has simply grown comically out of date?

People debate the degree of freedom photographers may be granted as a security tradeoff, but no one ever explains what the security tradeoff is. I suspect the actual tradeoff is police ‘security': they don’t like themselves or their work to be recorded. That’s understandable. But tough luck. They have legitimate power to use violence, so they should be under reasonable scrutiny anyway. (Consider Ian Tomlinson.)