  When an electromagnetic signal propagates in vacuo, a polarization detector
cannot be rigorously perpendicular to the wave vector because of diffraction
effects. The vacuum behaves as a noisy channel, even if the detectors are
perfect. The ``noise'' can however be reduced and nearly cancelled by a
relative motion of the observer toward the source. The standard definition of a
reduced density matrix fails for photon polarization, because the
transversality condition behaves like a superselection rule. We can however
define an effective reduced density matrix which corresponds to a restricted
class of positive operator-valued measures. There are no pure photon qubits,
and no exactly orthogonal qubit states.
