Is it a crime to videotape law enforcement?

Read the original here.

You have a right to record the police
by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Special to the Washington Examiner
posted September 4, 2011 at11:30am

All over America, police have been arresting people for taking video or making sound recordings of them, even though such arrests are pretty clearly illegal. Usually, the charges are dropped once the case becomes public, and usually that’s the end of it.

But sometimes things go farther, and in two recent cases, they’ve gone far enough to bite back at the police and prosecutors involved. We need more such biting.

The first case comes from Barack Obama’s hometown of Chicago.

Tiawanda Moore had made a sexual harassment complaint against a Chicago patrolman. When she was visited by police Internal Affairs officers who tried to persuade her to drop the charge, she recorded the audio using her Blackberry. Though the audio reflected rather poorly on the Internal Affairs officers, the response of the Chicago state's attorney was to act not against the offending officers, but against Ms. Moore, charging her with “wiretapping.”

After the tape was played, the jury took less than an hour to return a verdict of not guilty. "When we heard that, everyone (on the jury) just shook their head," said one juror interviewed afterward. "If what those two investigators were doing wasn't criminal, we felt it bordered on criminal, and she had the right to record it.”

Illinois law makes it illegal to record conversations with public officials without their permission. If the officials are law enforcement officers, the penalty can be as much as 15 years in prison. It’s hard to see what purpose such a law could serve, except to protect corrupt officials from exposure.

It’s also hard to see why a prosecutor, like Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez, would bring charges against a citizen who recorded police officers who were improperly trying to get her to drop charges against a fellow officer she says groped and propositioned her during a domestic violence call. Perhaps the prosecution was trading favors with the police, or perhaps it was merely incredibly insensitive. Chicago voters should pay heed, either way.

In Massachusetts, meanwhile, the right of citizens to record the police has been upheld by the United States Court of Appeals For The First Circuit in the case of Glik v. Cunniffe. Passerby Simon Glik caught sight of three police officers arresting a young man. Hearing an onlooker shout that the officers were hurting the man, Glik turned on his cellphone and began capturing video. The police officers objected to being recorded, arresting Glik and charging him with violating the state's “wiretap” law by recording them without their consent, seizing his camera and memory chip as evidence.

The U.S. Court of Appeals held that the right to record police officers in public is a “clearly established” part of the First Amendment's protections, and held the officers were thus not entitled to qualified immunity, meaning that they could be sued for their actions. The decision partially rectifies a situation in which for ordinary citizens, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but for police officers and other government officials, it’s an excuse that protects them from being sued.

In these cases, the courts (and juries) stood up for what should be an obvious proposition: Police officers, doing their jobs on the public dime, don’t have any sort of privacy right against the citizens who pay their salaries. Those who feel otherwise -- mostly police officers and those connected with them -- need to rethink the relationship of government to the citizenry, and perhaps reread the Constitution’s prohibition on “titles of nobility.”

In an era when government feels free to record citizens whenever they’re out in public, government officials need to recognize that this recording business works both ways. Want a surveillance society? Be prepared to live in it.

Of course, the efforts to intimidate citizens via prosecutions and arrests are doomed to fail in the long run. Pretty much every cellphone now is a video camera, a still camera, and an audio recorder. There are even smartphone apps specifically designed for recording police encounters and uploading them to the Web so that confiscating the phone doesn’t do any good. Tiny video cameras abound nowadays, including cameras that fit in the frames of sunglasses for added inconspicuousness. And they keep getting smaller and cheaper.

You can’t arrest everyone with a camera, especially when you don’t even know they’ve got a camera. But that’s not really the issue.

Technology may be winning, but the real problem is that America has a class of government workers who believe that they are above citizen scrutiny, and who are prepared to abuse their powers to avoid that scrutiny. The only solution for this is to punish offenders severely enough that others learn their lesson.

Some have proposed a federal civil rights law specifically recognizing the right of citizens to record police, and including severe punishments for police and prosecutors who violate that right. Frankly, it seems like a pretty good idea. Until then, however, we need to educate both police and citizens that photography is not a crime, even when those who wield government power, ostensibly on behalf of the citizenry, would rather not be photographed.

Government runs things well...

If you didn't notice the sarcasm. The TSA is a joke, just like the DMV and the Post Office. So glad they strip searched that 95 year old terminally ill grandmother's diaper.  It goes along with my theory, that government sucks at running things, because there's no inherent motivation. They don't take hits for performing badly and it's not their own money they're wasting. Good thing healthcare isn't run by....oh crap. Read the original here.

Authorities Arrest Nigerian Olajide Noibi For Allegedly Flying From John F. Kennedy International Airport JFK To LAX Los Angeles Using Expired Boarding Pass « CBS New York

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – CBS News has confirmed that authorities are looking into a shocking security breach that took place at John F. Kennedy International Airport last week.

Investigators say Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi, a Nigerian, boarded Virgin America Flight 415 to Los Angeles without a valid passport or identification, using an expired boarding pass for a flight the day before that belonged to someone else.

Officials say Noibi got through security and was able to board the plane. No one noticed until the flight was airborne when a flight attendant realized Noibi was sitting in a seat that was supposed to be vacant.

He showed the attendant the expired boarding pass that was in someone else’s name and then showed a University of Michigan identification card with his picture on it.

Investigators say the boarding pass belonged to a man who said his boarding pass went missing from his pocket on his way to the airport on June 23.

Investigators say Noibi used that pass to board the plane the next day.

Noibi was allowed to get off the plane when it landed in Los Angeles.

Days later, investigators say he went back to LAX and tried to board a Delta flight to Atlanta.

This time, he was searched and airport officials found 10 expired boarding passes in his bag , none of them in his name.

The Transportation Security Administration says Noibi was screened before he boarded the flight from New York.

“Every passenger that passes through security checkpoints is subject to many layers of security including thorough physical screening at the checkpoint,” Transportation Security Administration spokesman Greg Soule said. “TSA’s review of this matter indicates that the passenger went through screening.”

Noibi was taken into custody and has been charged with being a stowaway but not under any terror or security laws.

The investigation is still ongoing.

(TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2011 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)