Secret Service Demands Tourist Delete Photos

[KeithPA]

A uniformed police officer from the Secret Service directed a tourist to delete photographs that he took Sunday outside Nationals Park in Washington, the local CBS affiliate reports.

Mark Butler, a visitor from Minnesota, says the officer told him to delete images of the new stadium because they included security checkpoints that were set up at outside one of the gates because President Bush was due to throw out the opening pitch.

"It's kind of like not being in America," Butler tells WUSA-TV.

But a spokesman for the Secret Service says the president's guards were well within their rights. "We do have the authority to ask someone to remove their pictures from a camera," Malcolm Wiley, the Secret Service spokesmen, tells our corporate cousins.

A spokesman for the ACLU tells WUSA-TV that he's not aware of any laws or regulations that give the Secret Service the authority to demand the deletion of photographs taken on a public street.

"It should have been obvious that this, this man was taking photographs of the baseball stadium and that there was no reason for concern," lawyer Arthur Spitzer tells the station.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline...t-service.html

[RocketFoot]

He's lucky they didn't put a boot on the back of his head and take the camera! Try taking pictures of a nuclear power plant and see what happens!