My main hobby is photography, so I've been interested and dismayed to see how police forces around the country are increasingly bullying amateur and professional snappers in the name of security. It's never happened to me, I'm glad to say, probably because I seldom take pictures in cities and large towns (for the simple reason that I don't visit them often).

You'll no doubt be pleased to hear that I'm not going to rehash the arguments for and against the relevant legislation. I will though mention one recent news item that caught my eye. It's on the Web site of Amateur Photographer (AP), probably Britain's oldest photo magazine.

According to the article, the Metropolitan Police Service says it would take it "between one and two minutes" each time to search the relevant records. It reckons the total cost of this would take it beyond the current threshold of £450 (£600 for central government), so doesn't have to comply with the AP's freedom of information request. You can almost hear the "Naah naah na naah naah", can't you?

The idea of a cost limit was put in the Freedom of Information Act to save public bodies from having to deal with frivolous requests. As here, it is sometimes used as a pretext for continued secrecy, typically to conceal incompetence or to save embarrassment.

This assertion from 'The Met' is unbelievable. Scotland Yard is Britain's oldest and largest customer for the Memex search system. More than 30,000 of its officers and 12,000 other employees use this software to gain near-instantaneous access to criminal intelligence. (That's intelligence as information, not as an indication of intellectual capacity.)

In effect, The Met is saying it doesn't have a computer-searchable record of the search and arrest records its officers are producing. What are all its information inputters and OCR scanners doing with their day? Has it wasted the many thousands of pounds it's spent on Memex systems over the last 15 years?

Even if the search and arrest records for last year, say, still aren't computerised (which is unlikely), you can bet they're in the queue. The marginal cost of an FOI search on them once they're scanned would therefore be minute.

The Metropolitan Police is apparently charging administrative time at £25 an hour. The FOI limit of £450 thus equates to 18 hours of its staff's time. I reckon that would leave it at least 17 hours and 45 minutes to print and bind a computer-produced report on its search and arrest records and deliver it by hand to the AP's offices. They're all of 9 miles away from New Scotland Yard, mind, so it might be a bit of a scramble. Perhaps it should just email the report instead.

PS The eZ Systems CMS software on The Met's Web site produced no hits when I searched its news bulletins just now for "photographer" and, separately, "photography". Looks like Scotland Yard's limiting that supply of information, too.