The other day, I saw this media photo of a SpaceX rocket that was readied for launch:
The photographer’s choice to include the No Photography sign in this picture reminded me of a No Photography sign I saw a few years ago in Budapest, at a construction site in the vicinity of the US embassy:
These signs are ridiculous. You don’t see them often in democracies; they were very frequently encountered in the former Soviet Bloc. Which once made me wonder… all a Western spy had to do was to drive around the country and mark the location of No Photography signs in order to get a fairly accurate map of all the communist regime’s sensitive installations.
In the era of the ubiquitous smartphone with HD camera, not to mention more advanced gadgets like Google’s Glass or even toy drones with HD video, these signs are pitifully pointless.