Mass. Court Says Constitution Protects Filming On-Duty Police

Even in a country and a world where copyright can be claimed as an excuse to prevent you from taking a photo of a giant sculpture in a public, tax-paid park, and openly recording visiting police on your own property can be construed as illegal wiretapping, it sometimes seems like the overreach of officialdom against people taking photos or shooting video knows no bounds. It's a special concern now that seemingly everyone over the age of 10 is carrying a camera that can take decent stills and HD video. It's refreshing, therefore, to read that a Federal Appeals Court has found unconstitutional the arrest of a Massachusetts lawyer who used his phone to video-record an arrest on the Boston Common. (Here's the ruling itself, as a PDF.) From the linked article, provided by reader schwit1: "In its ruling, which lets Simon Glik continue his lawsuit, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston said the wiretapping statute under which Glik was arrested and the seizure of his phone violated his First and Fourth Amendment rights."

Comments

Missed one...

[MickyTheIdiot]

You are missing the recent case in Rochester where a woman was arrested on her own front lawn for videotaping an arrest going on just off of her property. IIRC the D.A. decided to not bring the case to trial, but the police continued to harass the woman and a demonstration held against the arrest. There was also a news conference with one of those great police organisations going off about how the video recording makes them "less safe."

What bollocks... if the tables were turned you know the police would scream that there was no expectation of privacy on a public street... and the woman was standing on her very own lawn.

Re:Great News!

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Being a former Marine myself, I can speak on this subject with some experience.

First, Marines are indoctrinated from the very beginning that harming civilians -- aka "collateral damage" -- is something to be avoided as much as is humanly possible. Expecting perfect, rational judgment by everyone, everywhere, all the time, while having bullets zipping past you and RPG's exploding a few yards away is unrealistic, but the deliberate fragging of a civilian is not only frowned upon, it's considered cowardly, dishonorable, and unbecoming of a Marine. Contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. military doesn't want a bunch of bullies running around with rank and weapons. Boot camp exists to weed out the weak *and* the morally questionable types. Some slip through; no system is perfect. But the *intention* is this kind of "person" never makes it to a point where he can be a power-tripping, gun-toting threat to an otherwise-harmless civilian.

That being said, I personally know of many instances in Iraq and Afghanistan where enemy combatants -- not in uniform, thus indistinguishable from civilians -- pretend to surrender, even going so far as to carry white flags. When Marines try to accept their surrender, they drop the flag and open fire, or their buddies open fire from concealed positions elsewhere. The use of women and children as human shields is the norm, not the exception. There are instances where women and children have turned up dead in areas where no Allied forces have operated, yet their deaths are blamed on Allied forces, the 7.62mm bullets in their bodies blamed on Allied troops wielding clandestine AK-47's instead of the 5.56mm NATO rounds in our M4's. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to divine there's probably more than a little "embellishment" coming from an opposition that knows civilian casualties cause all sorts of bad press for Western forces when a sympathetic press picks up and carries such photos without ever bothering to find out the circumstances under which they were obtained.

I agree with you that any Marine, soldier, sailor, or airman who willingly, knowingly, maliciously kills -- or attempts to kill -- an unarmed, non-threatening civilian is deserving of the harshest punishment the UCMJ can mete out and then some. Such actions tarnish all of us and make a difficult mission even harder. That said, do not be so quick to rush to judge the Marine and idolize the reporter. There's a lot more to the story than can be communicated in a headline. Never forget a reporter's best interests are served by stories that generate the maximum amount of controversy, whether that controversy is deserved or not. Unless you were there, in the room, and knew everything that the Marine knew when he pulled the trigger, you know nothing more than what the reporter told you. Knowing half the facts is often worse than knowing none of them.

Semper Fi

Re:I really really hope this is appealed

[icebike]

All the way to the Supreme Court, and we can have a final ruling that recording public officials in public is, you know, legal.

You don't need it to go that far. I can't see any city or state wanting to contest this much higher, in light of the fact that the ruling was pretty clear. It was after all, just the officers that contested it this far. They didn't have any governmental backing, and the Boston Municipal court had already bitch slapped the officers down and dismissed all charges. I just don't see those guys having the financial backing to go much further.

Unless some other circuit rules contrary, this is the precedent that will be cited country wide.