In the US virtually all public places and people are fair game for photographs. One has no legal expectation of privacy in public place in the US. That said, I

In the US virtually all public places and people are fair game for photographs. One has no legal expectation of privacy in public place in the US. That said, I am more qualified to be on commenting on petapixel than Hacker News. On photo web sites there are endless stories of overreach by individuals and institutions that attempt to limit a photographers right to take photographs in public. The situation in the USA is different than many other countries where photographing anyone associated with the military, any military installation and a great amount of "infrastructure" sites are off limits to photographers. So while the Port Authority probably has no legal standing to limit photography it is interesting to ask if they have any logical standing for doing so. In numerous texts on the topic of physical security this issue is addressed. Security experts typically say that persons taking video or photos of secured locations with particular regard to photos of perimeter security, lighting security and cameras might be viewed as suspicious actors. That common sense advice is taken to an absurd extreme here as it is highly unlikely that a threat actor would utilize a 4x5 camera, which is cumbersome, obvious and reliant on labor intensive film processing, on a tripod to take surveillance photos. I experienced a similarly absurd episode when taking a photo of the weathered hopper control levers of a NYC garbage truck. A sanitation worker informed me that it was not allowed to take photographs of NYC vehicles. While I was tempted to inquire what the strategic import of the garbage control levers was, I held my tongue, finished my pictures and left. As an example of how crazy people get at photographers check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97hfxth3aas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97hfxth3aas