And it is apparently buying itself legislation that prohibits anybody from taking a photograph of a "farm". Many states in the US already have absolutely crazy laws that prevent simple free speech that criticise the food industry (the so-called veggie laws) but now they also want to prevent anybody from taking simple pictures of farms even from public roads. Clearly they want to prevent the public from finding out about the abusive practices that some say occur in these highly industrialized places. If you have Netflix, I recommend you stream Food Inc to your TV/computer/iPad/iPhone to learn a little more but that is not as graphic as the video linked to in the New York Times article above. The book that the movie is based on "the Omnivore's dilemma" is better but takes a little longer to read. An instructive rant on the farm photography Stalinist laws is at silber studios.tv. Clearly this is not about the small farms that they make it sound like in the laws but about protecting the grind-them-up-alive operations that "produce" so much of today's "food". Of course the laws are written so that it applies to any food producing entity, not just the factory feedlot operations.
I don't know about you but I think something is deeply wrong when you could get thrown into jail for taking a cell phone picture of a farm next to a road. Note also how diametrically opposed this is to the well known right of photographers to photograph what can be seen from the public road excepting maybe a few national security related places such as certain DOE and DOD installations.
we have let the machinery of corporations run over us ... people think of skynet and the terminator, but the real threat is not even contained in anything physical, it is the writing of laws which give corporeal power to the corporations. You can't punish or imprison a corporation.
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