I am not a lawyer, but I did some research on the law after I was stopped by the police after taking pictures in a subway station.

Here’s where I laid out my research, but the upshot is:
–New York state DOES have a stop-and-identify law, forcing you to provide ID;
–However, the stop-and-identify law, which can compel you to show ID (rather than just asking you for it), is only triggered when the police are “detaining you”, as in a Terry stop. This requires that the police can articulate “reasonable suspicion” that you are engaging in criminal activity…and the state Office of the Attorney General has held that “the refusal to identify oneself will not alone give rise to ‘reasonable suspicion.’”
–A case called People v. De Bour lays out a four-part test for differing levels of police intrusion in New York State. It’s actually more restrictive than federal law. At the first tier, “an officer may request information from a civilian about his or her identity, reason for being at a particular location, or travel plans, where the request is ’supported by an objective, credible reason, not necessarily indicative of criminality.’” The second tier, called the “common-law right of inquiry”, allows an officer to more closely question a civilian in search of more explanatory information, but the civilian is always free to leave. (This level requires a “founded suspicion” that criminal activity is afoot, but the questionee doesn’t have to be the suspect.) The third level requires “reasonable suspicion”, is equivalent to a Terry stop, and the officer can detain the civilian and compel them to identify themselves. The fourth tier requires “probable cause”, and is an arrest.
–As the appellate court wrote in De Bour, “innocuous behavior alone will not generate a founded or reasonable suspicion that a crime is at hand.”

Again, I’m not a lawyer, but thought this information might be useful.

The photography Operations Order probably just reduces the number of actual arrests, while the information gathering continues.

This is criminalization of photography, the artist’s equivalent of the Terry stop.

NYPD: How many cameras were used in bringing down WTC? The Pentagon? Right, I didn’t think any were.

Considering that very tiny, very high resolution cameras are available for just a few hundred dollars, the terrorist that actually needs a camera can now be discreet when taking pictures of buildings, bridges etc.