Suddenly a new problem confronts visitors to New York, aside from the filthiness of the subways and the fact that they have to sneak outside of a bar to enjoy a cigarette. Now they will have to worry that when they whip our their camcorders to take some pictures for grandma back home, Mayor Bloomberg is going to have them ticketed. They can guard against that fate by hiring not only a tour guide but a couple of dozen First Amendment lawyers to traipse around town and tell them under which rules they’ll be allowed to take out their cameras.

Forgive the sardony, but that’s what arises from the proposed rules, first reported in Friday’s New York Times, being mooted by the mayor’s office in the wake of a lawsuit filed a year or so ago by the geniuses at the New York Civil Liberties Union. The Union jumped into court when the police, using the common sense that has been the hallmark of the Kelly years at One Police Plaza, briefly detained a documentary film-maker, Rakesh Sharma, who was filming in mid-town with a hand-held camera.

From the kerfuffle that followed come proposed rules that would require even small groups who film in one location for more than 10 minutes with a tripod or half an hour without one to obtain a permit. Such a rule would appear to apply to the father who filmed his children as they all waited in line to gain entry to the Empire State Building, a point suggested by a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Dunn, in a letter to the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre, and Broadcasting, which is considering the rules.

It was the civil liberties union that asked for a formal set of rules in the first place. Our inclination is that the better situation would be not to have rules at all but to rely on the judgment of the rank and file police officers who patrol our streets. This is the opposite of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has reached a point where it seems to view each officer as an enemy of freedom. The fact is that in several instances accused terrorist plotters have been discovered to have filmed casing videos of landmarks in American cities.

In New York alone, on three separate occasions since 2002, federal authorities have asked Iranians connected to that country’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations to leave America after they were found filming landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the subway system. No municipal permitting scheme — such as the one proposed by the mayor’s office — is needed to give the federal government the authority to send suspicious diplomats back to their home country.

The key to preventing terrorists from snooping around our city is to have a vigilant citizenry and tireless law enforcement officials who are focused on the threat. Regulating one more aspect of life in this city is beside the point. Vacation is already heavy on paperwork. It’s bad enough Americans have to obtain a license to drop a line in a stream or build a campfire. It would be a sad day if New York became a place where a family has to get a permit before making a home video.