From “The Neighbors”
There are no ifs or ands to the photos taken by New York City artist Arne Svenson but there’s at least one but — butt, more properly — and its owner is displeased at being so immortalized.
The Associated Press reports that Svenson snapped the images of residents of a glass-walled luxury apartment building across the street from his own through (one hopes) a rear window. The artist was careful to obscure the subjects’ faces, or avoid showing them altogether.
If officers of the Transportation Security Administration are going to continue to “have their way” with female passengers—and it looks like they are—they should at least rent a room. Certainly, they should take the precaution of checking passengers’ credentials.
If they had in the case of Karen H. Kaplan, of Washington, D.C., they might have learned that she is a journalist. Fittingly, Kaplan has written up her experience at Norfolk International Airport on Nov. 25. Her first-person account, which appears in Sunday’s theday.com, makes several critical claims that the TSA should be called upon to react to.
“Can you hear me now?” a successful ad campaign by Verizon Wireless asked. The campaign was discontinued in 2011, but an article in Monday’s New York Times suggests that the New York Police Department has been quietly and methodically amassing cellular telephone call logs, and doing so without a court order—or even your knowledge.
The well-intentioned program, which captures phone logs and enters the records into a massive database, was initiated with New Yorkers’ best interests at heart. It was designed to help the NYPD track down stolen cell phones by subpoenaing the call records of phones that are reported stolen. Any new calls made from or to the phone would raise a flag in the Enterprise Case Management System, ultimately leading police to the thief.