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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."
So only lawyers can film the police doing shit now?
Yes, there have been quite a few reports of people being arrested and their cameras confiscated merely for videoing the police. I applaud this decision and I do hope it causes these statutes to be struck down once and for all.
Generally I'm on the side of private citizens' right to record events, and the police should never be doing anything that makes them shy about being recorded.
It must be said, though, that to do their job in the real world, police do have to occasionally cajole and threaten people into confessing. It's not due process but realistically it needs to be done. If everyone fought every charge in court, there would be a total logjam. A cop, coming upon a suspect at the scene of a crime, can sometimes intimidate them into 'fessing up without a lot of hassle and expense, and frankly without that we'd have a lot more crime.
So, I hope citizens bear this in mind when taping officers of the law. There's some similarity to the embedded journalists on combat squads in urban warfare situations like Iraq where Marines bursting into a room and discovering a militant lying on the floor holding a white flag will go ahead and frag him out of fear he's got a grenade or suicide belt on him, a common enough occurrence. The journalist will slavishly record the scene, then report it as Marine brutality against an unarmed opponent. Presto, you now have guaranteed more dead Marines.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
constitution
Seriously, though, the First Amendment is the biggest con in modern politics. In America, everyone thinks they're free because they believe that the right to speak is more important than the right to be heard.
Unfortunately for the Rochester case, the woman in question happens to be an EXTREMELY annoying protester who organizes sit-ins and human chains for things as mundane as evictions and foreclosures. She is still well within her rights to film on-duty officers but her history just kind of sucks the legitimacy out of her case.
But yet most of those things can be, and should be, provided by private enterprise and would be better suited to private enterprise.
Taxation buys civilization at a much higher price and at a much lower quality than what private enterprise can do. While there is a use for court systems, and armed forces to protect the country along with limited (elected) police officers, such things can be paid for in a much better way than the current tax based on income, instead it should be paid like everything else, based on use.
Taxation is exactly a form of theft when you look at it for what it is.
Lets say a man comes up to you and demands your car and threatens you with bodily harm, surely we can call him a thief. Lets say 2 men come up with you and do the same thing. Does it stop being theft? Lets say 3 men come up to you, take a vote on if you should have your car, and all three of them vote to take your car and you are the lone dissenter. Is it still theft? What if 10 people came in much the same way and took your car and left you a bicycle. Is it still theft? How many people need to be in a mob for it to stop being theft? Surely even if 100 people came, took your brand new 2011 Porsche and replaced it with a 1988 Honda, it would still be theft, correct? Taxation is much the same thing, it is still theft no matter how many people are in the mob trying to take your property.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Finally, a judge who isnt off in la-de-da-liberal-land.. Of course since this isn't the SCOTUS, it only applies to the 1st Circuit area. This would need to be ruled by SCOTUS or all of the circuit/appeals courts to apply nationwide.. Now we ALL KNOW thats not gonna happen.
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Randroids with mod points. As inevitable as death and taxes.
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Dead cops and dead marines is your preference, coward?
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
The average person has more to fear and more interactions with a police officer than they do criminals. Police, can and do, destroy people's lives and kill them for no reason while expecting (and often getting) the backing of the state.
We'd be better off on our own than we are with the current population of pigs.
"Insure own safety"? Fuck you, "he's coming right at us! blam blam blam" is cowardice.
Any police officer unwilling to face "real hardened criminals" should quit. There are better people out there for the job. Police make money for the prison industrial complex, they do not protect the population. That's a figment of your imagination.
I am a gun toting conservative, and I hate cops for many reasons (this Slashdot article is an example) Your false cop-dick sucking faggot ass needs to stop implying you are a conservative, you are nothing more than a liar. Real conservatives don't give into authoritarians, which is what cops are when they don't follow the rules, to the letter, every time, every minute of the day.