"Did you just photograph that building?"

Conversation between me and a traffic cop, April 23, on Lubyanka Square:

Cop: “Did you just photograph that building?”
Me: “Well...yes.”
Cop: “Delete your picture of the building and let me see you do it. You can't photograph that building.”
Me: “Why not?”
Cop: “It's not allowed.”

The conversation continued - I pointed out that the building is a landmark and a tourist attraction, but he just kept telling me that it was forbidden to photograph THAT BUILDING. He wasn't getting too hostile, though, because he saw that I really was moving to delete the photos I had taken of the building.

Who knows if there's really an official ban on photographing the Lubyanka (the former headquarters of the KGB and current headquarers of its successor organization, the FSB); the point is that this cop was willing to zealously go after an imagined threat - someone photographing Lubyanka - something which he imagined or had been told would displease his superiors.

Of course, it's easy to imagine something like this happening in the US these days, but then I am no big fan of the paranoia stirred up by the Bush administration, either.

What makes the whole story even more amusing is that I had really been photographing a guy selling pirated software and all kinds of law enforcement databases right in the shadow of Lubyanka. Here's a photo of some of what was available:



Note the presence, among relatively innocuous and unsurprising pirated Microsoft products, of government databases of registered drug addicts (“Narkomany”), felons ("Sudimosti"), and residential registration records ("Propiska"), as well as mobile phone subscriber databases, including addresses, and driver license records.

The availability of such databases is probably inevitable in a country with underpaid law enforcement officials and bureaucrats, extraordinary hackers, and lots of people who like to resolve problems without the involvement of the government and need this information to do so. But it never ceases to amaze me that such confidential information is sold so freely and openly. What I'm not putting up here - no need to antagonize law enforcement - are the photos I took of the same cop who harrassed me and his partner chatting with the guy selling the pirated disks. They were either asking him to pack it in or working out a deal with him to allow him to stay - my money's on the latter.