Oil spill pictures taken within 65 feet of animals, workers and equipment may be history.
U.S. Coast Guard announces ban on civilians near oil spill. Would someone please tell me when the First Amendment was repealed?
U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen yesterday announced a ban on members of the public, including members of the media, coming within 65 feet of boats and oil boom. The ban was allegedly put in place at the behest of local governmental officials. Allen said the ban was necessary for security and safety reasons–that officials were afraid someone would get hurt. It seems more likely that Allen and his “partner” BP were worried about someone getting criticized because of heart-wrenching oil spill pictures than they are that someone will get hurt. So far, the only injuries that I can recall hearing about on the Gulf Coast are injuries to workers breathing BP’s toxic oil and dispersant fumes without respirators (which are banned by BP).
CNN’s Anderson Cooper announced the ban last night. Cooper showed a clip of Thad Allen announcing several weeks ago that his policy was unrestricted access for the public unless restrictions were necessary for security or safety. Then Cooper showed a clip of Allen yesterday tap-dancing around, trying to justify the restrictions on the basis of safety. As Anderson Cooper pointed out, the animal pictures we have seen, particularly those of oiled birds at the wildlife rescue center, would never have reached the public if the Coast Guard’s ban had been in effect and in force.
Said Anderson Cooper: “We are not the enemy here…. To create a blanket rule that everyone has to stay 65 feet away from boom and boat, that doesn’t sound like transparency. Frankly it’s a lot like in Katrina when they tried to make it impossible to see recovery efforts of people who died in their homes. If we can’t show what is happening, warts and all, no one will see what’s happening, and that makes it very easy to hide failure and hide incompetence…. We found out today two public broadcasting journalists reporting on health issues say they’ve been blocked again and again from visiting a federal mobile medical unit in Venice, the trailer where cleanup workers are being treated.”
How serious is the government about the media blackout? You could be fined up to $40,000 and convicted of a felony if found guilty!
It’s time Thad Allen was replaced with someone who doesn’t act as if he’s taking marching orders from British Petroleum. The First Amendment protects our right to see what’s happening on our public beaches, and if Thad Allen and BP don’t like the pictures of birds and dead animals we’re being shown, they should have been doing a better job of preventing the catastrophic damage to the environment that we’ve been witnessing.
The public’s right to be present on public beaches, marshes and waters should not be unilaterally revoked by the edict of a retired Coast Guard Admiral who has now failed to inspire confidence in about 90% of the citizenry. We hope that an army of media attorneys will be camped out at the federal court in New Orleans when it opens in a few hours. We also hope that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will be hounded unmercifully about this issue by the White House press. And we hope that everyone who lives on or near the Gulf Coast will take every opportunity to photograph and shoot video of birds, fish, turtles and other animals that may be affected by the oil spill. Then people can upload their oil spill pictures to the Internet to at least partially break the media blockade.
I wrote in an earlier post about oil spill pictures and the First Amendment, “if the Ayatollahs can’t stop twitter, BP can’t stop us.” I’ll add to that: the Coast Guard can’t stop all of us either. There are too many people on the Gulf Coast with cameras. There are too many people who love the wildlife and the Gulf to allow the boot of a retired Coast Guard Admiral to trample our first amendment rights and run a sloppy, perhaps-incompetent oil spill cleanup out of sight of U.S. citizens. We, the people of the U.S., own the waters, beaches and marshes, and Admiral Thad Allen is supposed to be our servant, not our master. We cannot quietly sit by and allow this unprecedented order to stand.
Related posts:
- Oil spill pictures, the BP coverup, and the First Amendment
- Not safe for children – oil spill images – Gulf Coast birds
- The video BP does not want you to see
Agree or disagree with our view that the First Amendment protects our right to see pictures and get honest, independent reporting on the oil spill? Please leave a comment.
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This is an absolutely ridiculous revocation of rights. If there’s nothing to hide, don’t hide anything. Mistrust is rampant as is this environmental holocaust. WE THE PEOPLE demand full disclosure. March on Washington Labor Day Weekend. http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=128192210550148&ref=ts
I am really ticked at what BP allowed to happen with the oil spill. Accidents like this should not happen, it is like a nuke going off, that just doesn’t happen. With enough planning and safety as the #1 focus, there never would have been a spill.
However, my comment is that this blog item is a pretty sensational. “65 feet away from boom and boat” to me means that they don’t want people anywhere near their equipment. Same thing goes for our ferry system in WA state, they have coast guard escort these boats to keep people away (when we are at a heightened state of alert).
We as a nation are under scrutiny for terrorist attack, they don’t need to be nervous that people close are supposed journalists that could be enemies.
A good lens on a camera for a professional photographer can easily give a crystal clear picture at 65′. For example, my 10 megapixel camera that cost me $100 is pretty good at that range.
These oil spill pictures of birds show why it’s not just sensationalism; this is what BP doesn’t want us to see. And I don’t think these pictures could all have been taken at 65 feet.
While a good camera with good *OPTICAL* zoom (i.e. no camera you paid $100 for) can get astounding shots, no camera can take a photo when its line of sight is obstructed. That leaves a most shots largely unobtainable. I should point out that at 65′, you need a fairly large, expensive ($1,000+) lens, coupled with a SLR/DSLR camera ($300+) to get anyting approximating a clear shot. Your camera, which you tout as having 10MPX at a cost of $100 is likely using digital zoom, which is nothing more that cropping the image recieved to make it appear bigger, albeit at a dramatic loss of quality. The best optical zoom I’ve seen on a camera under $250 is about 6X, or roughly good enough to get a clear shot up to about 20′-25′.
Learn a little bit more about a subject before you open your mouth… It may save you some embarassment.
Oh, and you might want to read the first amendment. It doesn’t have any provisions for convenience. It prohibits restrictions on freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly. That means, in case you can’t figure it out, that it is illegal for them to stop citizens of the U. S. for gathering, discussing, reporting, praying, or demonstrating on our beaches, waterways, etc., under any circumstance.
So wait. Did the media revert back to 1930s camera technology? My cheap digital camera can zoom in clearly from 65 feet away with both pics and vids! Guess more faux outrage designed to rile up the masses!
Congrats on your great camera. Please upload some pix taken from 65 feet away that compare to the closeups in the YouTube videos posted on this site. Thanks.
Fact is, when you’re 65 feet away, you don’t have the same viewpoint (outside of your camera lens) to conceive of and frame the same picture. Technology is great, but some people overrate it.
Again, I encourage you, as well, to learn more about the technology. You need to learn about the different types of zoom, aperature and exposure control, and differences in encoding of digital images. You may have 10 or 12 MPX, but as soon as you attempt to use digital zoom, you will start rapidly losing resolution, roughly halving that number for every 1X increase in zoom. Therefore, going as little as 4X digital zoom on a 12MPX camera reduces the resolution on the image taken to roughly 1.5MPX. That’s the equivalent of a Barbie camera from the toy department. Most phones can produce better images, though at shorter ranges. If you still don’t understand the difference, try this: take a photo of a street sign with your “cheap digital camera ” at maximum zoom, with the sign completely filling one dimension of the viewfinder. Then reduce to no zoom and move forward until you have roughly the same image on your screen and take another photo. load both onto your computer and look at the difference in quality, not to mention probable difference in angle, due to difference in viewpoint. I think you’ll find the long-distance photo less than pleasing, and certainly not anywhere near on the same par as professional equipment at close range.
And just so you understand that I’m not just talking nonsense here, I will note that one of my specialties in photography is taking photos of small insects at a distance, using a zoom lens. I’m not ignorant of the difficulties involved with distance photography.
I also have, as one of my cameras, a Zeiss Ikon Nettar 515/2, which is a german made camera from prior to World War II. Before you criticize 1930s camera technology, I suggest you go to Flickr.com and do a search for the camera I just listed. Keep in mind that this is a folding tourists camera, designed to be carried in a pocket, not even a professional camera. Look at the image quality and then I bet you’ll reconsider your opinion on cameras from the 1930s…
Dear Sekhmei, thank you for your lecture on camera technology, but no one cares. We care about being censored illegally, we care about our shores being decimated, we care about our environment dying, and we care about the slaughter of thousands of defenseless animals. You claim to have vast knowledge of photography, but in your effort to belittle others you’ve failed to see the big picture.
BP is such a joke… they should all be arrested along with the US govt. How long ago did they cap the leak? And how many legitimate claims are still “pending” from damages they suffered back in the beginning of the summer? I happen to know three people that were affected directly by BP’s shady PR tactics and manipulation of our laws, one of whom was a journalist who was almost arrested and charged with felonies for taking pictures of oil covered animals near the coast. Not only is it bad enough that thousands of fishers’ lively hoods are ruined for god knows how many years to come, they were paid a pathetic amount of money to clean up BP’s own mess. To add even more insult to injury, BP used Corexit 9527, which contains mainly 2-butoxyethanol, which is very toxic. You wouldn’t have to be a scientist to know that, since in the first week of using it over 70 fisherman ended up at the hospital. Of course if you even inquired about this, I’m sure the govt (which is pretty much owned by oil companies) would deal with you quite quickly, let alone taking pictures of it in an attempt to run a story on it. If you didn’t know already, the govt is doing what they do best… crapping on the 1st amendment: naturalnews.com/029130_Gulf_of_Mexico_censorship.html. My friend who almost got arrested on felony charges simply went out on a boat into about 30 feet of water and used a water proof cam to photograph one of the many oil plumes forming at the bottom of the surface (which BP vehemently denies). Now here comes the hilarious part. He switched the film in his camera with a blank one in the event they were stopped by police, which they were as soon as they got back to shore. They let him go but still took his name down, and what do you know… later that night, 2 guys wearing black hoodies attempted to break into his house. He caught pics of them on his home security system (he saved the pics… adt wireless alarm system break in photos). Hmm, I wonder who paid these guys to break in and what they were after? Definitely not BP or our govt, that’s for sure!
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