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Comment by Ajay-p | Hacker News Reader

I think this is a good thing. The government could record you without your consent, the citizen should be allowed to as well. I understand police need warrants, but what is the citizen to do? Especially when so many courts, judges, and juries take the word of police over the citizen.

Seems very fair to me.

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Absolutely. They surveil us, we sousveil them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

An old neighbor of mine has a webcam mounted in his front window to record license plates of people driving through his neighborhood. When I asked him why he told me that it was because the government and other people are recording his movements, why can't he?

That argument feels like a cheap cop-out. I want my government to follow a different ruleset than I have to: They should have the monopoly on violence and taxes.

Now, whether that applies to privacy is a different question, but it's clearly not as black-and-white as your neighbor makes it out to be.

> I want my government to follow a different ruleset than I have to

That's the definition of tyranny and authoritarianism. The same rules that apply to them should apply to us. To suggest otherwise is to accept there are special classes of people who are more deserving of freedoms than common men. The government people are just fallible, corruptible men. They are not a superior class of people who have a unique capacity for the lawful application of violence. They're just humans like us. They deserve to have exactly the same freedoms we ourselves enjoy, no more and no less.

Legally the government can’t record you without your consent.

In public, you have no expectation of privacy - so anyone can film anyone, government or non-government. That would be most police activity. Any other police activity - such as when raiding a home - would be subject to standard legal review in terms of admission into discovery and whatnot.

With a warrant, they definitely can legally record you without your consent and your knowledge, e.g. secretly invading your home and placing recording devices there - IMHO that's the point of the parent post; while there are checks and balances that require legal review, in the end, the government can do all that unilaterally after a judge approves that it is necessary.

Yes. Not just with a warrant, but often without a warrant or just cause. The police can lie to you, violate your rights, and do almost anything they want to you, but if you don't have body cam or other video/audio evidence, as so many, many people have found, you are screwed.

There is an excellent shortcut called "Hey Siri, I'm being pulled over" that "will dim your phone, pause any music being played, and start recording video from your front-facing camera."

Not all cops are bad, but the power imbalance makes these issues necessary for citizens to protect themselves.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/17/21293996/siri-iphone-shor...

My point is that the same body of text (state law) that defines wiretapping laws (recording consent) also defines that the police can record without consent with a warrant and/or with probable cause - and if not, the footage (and other gathered evidence) is both inadmissible in court and could be grounds for a lawsuit depending on how egregiously they violated your rights.

>In public, you have no expectation of privacy

Only in the US. In most developed nations, this isn't the case: even in public you have a certain amount of privacy allowed, so for instance, people aren't allowed to take your photo without permission. Of course, there's practical limits here, but usually it comes down to whether the person is the subject of the photo or not. If a person sees themselves in a public photo, but they're in a crowd off in the distance, then that's ok. If someone is following them around and taking fairly close photos of them, that's not.

weird take.

This makes sense cause the public official doesn't have an expectation of privacy when they are performing their official duties. That makes sense. Nothing they should be doing when they are conversing with a member of the public should be private to them (unless it is private to the person they are talking to - and if it's private to someone else then they probably shouldn't be sharing it with the person recording).

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