Sunday, August 14, 2005

Mashy the Terrorist #2

I put the car in reverse to pull out and as I looked in my rear vision mirror a non-descript car pulls up behind me blocking me in. I'm slightly annoyed until I realise that this is deliberate and the guy is getting out of his car and coming towards me.
'So' he says. 'You were taking pictures over there I notice..'
'Umm yeah' I say.
Turns out this guy is from millitary security. As he tells me, they have cameras all around and they saw me taking photos. It was pretty impressive to have intercepted me within 1 minutes of taking the pics.
So the guy asks to see my pics. I have no problem showing him I am only interested in the sunset behind them and he obviously believes me. To his credit he was fairly nice. After making a phone call he say 'ok, I'll be happy if you delete half of them' Due to my nervousness I accidentally delete 5 out of the 6 I had so this shot is the only one I have left. Exactly what protection deleting HALF the photos provides them I don't know but I was happy to be out of there.

If I had someone to drive, I could easily get some great shots of the other dishes from the freeways around and no-one would ever know. And the articles in the local paper telling all about them really means this place is hardly a secret. Somehow I think Osama would be interested in oh-about 1 MILLION more potential targets.

So in short, Americans can sleep safely at night knowing their disused soon-to-be demolished educational antennas are being watched well but guarded completely ineffectively. And now the rest of us can laugh at their ridiculous paranoia.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your terrorist name: Mashy Bin-Eating :)

Anonymous said...

Hi Mashy,

Continuing to enjoy your blog. The one picture of the RT dish that you saved is cool. Personally i think that it would make a great image if all 32 dishes were still there - the sunset over those would be worthy of a record cover or something.

b