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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Two points:

1) Americans place freedom of speech (including photography or recording things) very highly and are willing to suffer some damage in exchange for more freedom.

2) Limits on recording in public would very quickly and very easily be weaponized by police against minorities, leftists, and basically anyone else who resists the creeping tide of ---- well, you know, right wing politics.

Saving celebrity's from paparazzi sounds nice and good, but we're more worried about what happens when the police show up. Can we record them attacking us, or will that now be considered an additional crime that the policeman will get to punish us for? It's very easy to see our rigged Supreme Court ruling that police officers have "an expectation of privacy on the job" in light of your points.

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The first page of the summary explains how there are already exceptions for recording police.

Those exceptions won't stop police from thinking you can't record them and using that as a reason to bust your phone followed by busting your lip. Him and his 5 buddies will go on to say that you provoked them and you'll never see justice.

In general, North American police are ignorant bullies who couldn't hack it through high school or college. Their maturity level is stuck in the past as well, usually never maturing past a 12th grade level.

Ok, so let's remove the ban and the exceptions and make it legal to record anyone.

Then you record a cop who doesn't want to be recorded. The cop beats you up, breaks your phone, and busts your lip. He and his five buddies say you provoked him, and you never see justice.

Problem solved?

It's partially solved.

You may have a chance to see justice because it won't matter if the cop and his 5 buddies say you provoked them with a camera. It's unambiguous that you can record them and there's no possibility of reasonable doubt if you're allowed to record them 100% of the time. There's no loophole they can use to say you can't record them due to privacy or safety or whatever other reasons they want to make up and they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you.

Do you ever wonder why cops don't want bodycams on them recording 24/7? Their job is supposedly so difficult and dangerous (their words,) that you'd think they would want to show the entire world how difficult and dangerous their jobs are. Maybe people would agree with them about increasing their funding instead of calling to defund them if they had video proof of the difficulty and danger in their jobs instead of taking their word for it?

> they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you

But like you said, they lied about you provoking them and destroyed the evidence showing that you didn't. Nobody will ever know that they beat you up just because you were recording.

I know why cops don't want body cams.

You quoted my conclusion without any context and ignored multiple crucial details:

> You may have a chance to see justice because it won't matter if the cop and his 5 buddies say you provoked them with a camera. It's unambiguous that you can record them and there's no possibility of reasonable doubt if you're allowed to record them 100% of the time. There's no loophole they can use to say you can't record them due to privacy or safety or whatever other reasons they want to make up and they'll be in the wrong the second they take action against you.

There won't be a lie they can spin because they won't have any justification for attacking a cameraman. Note I also said may and spoke of probabilities. Furthermore, I admitted it's only a partial solution so I'm not sure what gotcha you're going for here. I know it's not foolproof or perfect, it's merely better than what we currently have.

He could say you told him you had a gun, and brandished what looked like a gun. No reason to admit that it's really about the camera.

Cops can get away with literally shooting you in the back. Even outside qualified immunity cops can get away with a lot of things that are technically illegal. If it's a matter of testimony and it's five cops saying one thing and you saying something else, your chances aren't great.

But they already do that. There have already been cases of cops in the US arresting people for filming them. Not to mention cops have literally attacked journalists (not just "citizen journalists" but actual TV crews) at protests and destroyed their equipment.

You're saying this like the laws aren't different in other countries without these issues arising. It's reasonable to argue that a police officer on duty is exempt from the expectation of privacy and indeed many such countries have exemptions for police officers on duty.

It's also reasonable to have different expectations of privacy for people "of public interest" (i.e. celebrities, politicians and extremely wealthy business moguls) and indeed many such countries do distinguish between what privacy you can expect as an ordinary individual or someone whose job literally involves having their face frequently appear in public media.

Your response is very American too, by the way: while you are concerned about state oppression (or rather: the ability to record state oppression) I'm concerned about the oppression by both businesses and the state that a complete absence of an expectation of privacy outside well-defined private spaces enables. Specifically it trivial to justify mass surveillance and various forms of harassment.

Have you seen videos of bystanders trying to record militant leftist groups like Antifa?

Is that a thing in your country? In America, there are no "militant leftist groups" and all of the armed "militia" "insurrectionist" militant groups are right-wing.

All of the so-called leftists (we have basically zero support for actual leftism) here are just garden variety rioting young adults who dgaf about politics.

Naah, we’ve got the more militant types in a few spots, most notably Seattle. They’re not just figments of the Fox News imagination. To some extent they’re even an inspiration for the right wing militants.

Substantially fewer guns though, gotta be fair.

You absolutely have no idea what you’re talking about. You’ve likely never interacted with any antifascists and are only regurgitating what you are fed on the news.

It’s really sad so many people bought this crap narrative delivered by our corporate overlords.

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