The Wind in the Trees Was the Sound of a Thousand Clicking Cameras
Crowd estimation experts monitoring the anti-Iraq war demonstrations in Washington over the weekend say at least 10,000 of the marchers and spectators were Federal agents. The vast majority were equipped with cameras and photographed both marchers and spectators.
“We believe that something close to 10 million digital photographs were taken by Federal agents during the course of the day,” said Franklin Toothman, president of Mob Calculi International. The firm monitors public demonstrations and estimates their size and composition.
“During the time that Jane Fonda addressed the crowd, a lot of people thought they were hearing a wind in the trees, but in fact it was the sound of digital cameras clicking and whirring,” Toothman said.
“For a Federal agent, it had to be a once-in-a-career moment, the chance to have your photo of Hanoi Jane become the central photo in hundreds of thousands of secret dossiers that will sit on government servers for generations to come.”
Electrical utilities in the Washington area, which includes the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and Maryland, reported a surge in demand for electricity Saturday night, well after the anti-Iraq war demonstration ended. The utilities said a return of colder weather in the wake of an unusually warm January caused the demand surge.
But Toothman said that while colder temperatures might have contributed to the increased electricity usage, the dominant cause was the uploading of 10 million digital photos to thousands of government servers.
“Look, these photos were an urgent matter in the war on terror,” Toothman said. “You don’t let them sit around until you get back to the office on Monday. You go straight to your office and start getting them out of the cameras and straight into the servers in Ft. Meade or Langley or Cheney’s bunker out in West Virginia.”
Toothman said government photo analysts will spend much of the next year analyzing every photo and cross-linking photos and other information between dossiers on demonstrators.