Well, photographers, there’s good news and there’s bad news.

Last October, we wrote about this New York case, where a photographer was arrested, briefly detained and had his videotape confiscated for filming outside a federal courthouse in Manhattan. The New York Civil Liberties Union brought the case on the photographer’s behalf, ending in a settlement in which the Federal Protection Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, admitted that citizens have the right to film outside federal courthouses and pledged to notify their officers in writing. As reported on the New York Times’ Lens blog, the NYCLU recently received a redacted version of the statement, which (as it should) broadly applies to federal buildings nationwide, not just federal courthouses in Manhattan.

In a settlement with the New York Civil Liberties Union, the federal government relented that photographers are, indeed, allowed to take photos outside of federal buildings.

This is pretty good: Fox 5’s Tom Fitzgerald decided to do a report on the ongoing harassment of photographers inside D.C.’s busy Union Station, a topic we’ve written about and heard about from our own Flickr contributors many times before. While he was there interviewing Amtrak’s spokesperson on the subject, who in fact told the reporter that photography is absolutely allowed inside the Amtrak portion of the station, a security guard came up to the…

We’ve reported a few times on the issues that photographers run into with security around the D.C. area. In fact, stories of photographers being wrongly told that they’re not allowed to take pictures happens so often that there’s a whole group on Flickr dedicated to fighting against it. A few interesting stories have popped up this week, including the WUSA9 article about the Secret Service ordering a tourist to delete his photos at the National’s…