Illinois General Assembly passes bill to ban citizens from recording police | Hacker News Reader

Illinois General Assembly passes bill to ban citizens from recording police

illinoispolicy.org

158 pointsbenktbyte52 comments

Hold on, wait for me! I have to get my pitchfork.

Okay.

Reading now...

Sigh, I'm putting my pitchfork back, false alarm.

The old law got struck down [1] because the Constitution. The new one stipulates that it's only illegal in situations where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy [2]. Damn it, I can't get offended about this.

[1] http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-26/news/chi-supre... [2] http://politics.suntimes.com/article/springfield/state-eaves...

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/08/new-illinois-eavesdropping...

... the eavesdropping bill retains another odious aspect of the old law: It punishes unauthorized recordings of public officials—specifically, police officers, prosecutors, and judges—more severely than unauthorized recordings of ordinary citizens. The former would be a Class 3 felony, punishable by two to four years in prison, while the latter would be a Class 4 felony, punishable by one to three years in prison. If anything, that is the opposite of the distinction the law should draw, since public officials, given the power they wield, should be subject to greater scrutiny than private citizens.

Hmm, good point. I can at least get out some rotten fruit for this.

Ha! That won't stop the great city of Chicago from arresting you and throwing you in the slammer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm294TYqh6o

... And there are plenty more stories where that came from.

You could surely get around this by announcing loudly to the cop prior to every interaction that this is a public situation and there is no privacy to be found here... as proven by the existence of this camera crew and microphone.

Tell that to the 98% of people who will "surely" have never heard of this and think, reasonably, that recording a cop won't put them in jail.

Why would we tell the 2% that already know they can film the police? :P

Of course we want to tell the 98% they are free to film as well! But I take your point.

The former story, about Tiawanda Moore, concerns someone who was acquitted ~4 years ago, and is now (justifiably!) suing the city.

The latter concerns someone who was not arrested.

"reasonable expectation of privacy" from whose perspective?

if my spouse/gf/friends film my arrest in my own garage (without my objection, maybe even with my insistence), are they now subject to arrest?

There's a decent amount of precedent around what "reasonable expectation of privacy" means.

Which is a fine argument to make once you've been run through the justice system and finally get to face a judge.

But giving a tool to for officers to use while making an arrest, confiscating footage, and passing the case to prosecutors to file charges is not OK. Even if you think the trial judge, or worse, an appeals judge will rule on precedent. This law is meant as a cudgel to abuse the public.

You may beat the rap but you can't beat the ride.

Is that true regarding police officers?

If you make a scene, rousing the interest of the neighbors and other such passers by, does it then become public?

in this day and age, I don't expect privacy, ever.. with the NSA recording everything and forcing companies to comply, how do I even know if my cell phone isn't actively listening in on me?

I would love to make this argument. The federal government has already made it so that there is no expectation of privacy anywhere. RF, wired, optical networks are monitored and recorded, CCTVs and IPTVs by private, public, and government organizations/individuals are ubiquitous and many many people carry around devices that can record audio/video from multiple sources within a second of activation. Some of those devices are already passively recording and listening to everything (eg. Google Now enabled devices).

You're right, but that caveat alone still serves to muddy the waters. Just forcing people to have to think about whether they can record police interactions serves to discourage recordings for fear of the consequences. If Illinois police forces can't have a blanket eavesdropping ban to bash people over the head with, well, this is certainly the next best thing.

You have an appropriate handle for such a comment...

I live in Chicago but commute to Dallas every few weeks where my wife now lives. The difference is striking. In Illinois, taxes are high yet the government has failed to provide me with tangible services. I have been robbed and the police never did anything. I am left wondering where all the money goes. Meanwhile, my wife enjoys many government run programs in Texas and pays next to nothing in taxes.

What I am trying to say is avoid Illinois if at all possible.

I was robbed on the border between Oak Park and Chicago and the Chicago police had 2 of the 3 people who did it in under 10 minutes. It was pretty impressive.

what was the race of the robbers brought in by the police?

Having grown up in Illinois and visited Texas I'd say exactly the opposite: avoid Texas if at all possible.

Chicago is a world class city. Sorry you had a rough time.

> Chicago is a world class city. Sorry you had a rough time.

I moved from Chicago to (hard to have a sailboat in Texas) Florida because of how terrible the financial situation is in Illinois. Sure, great food, nice tourist city, fabulous architecture.

Cons: Property taxes that continue to increase to fund unfunded pensions. An income tax that continues to increase to close a unbalanced budget.

World class city? New York and San Francisco are world class cities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city

On Wikipedia doesn't make it so. I'll give you that Chicago is a transportation hub, solely because of its geographic location with regards to air transport and rail. Other than that, its seriously deficient as a city.

Have you ever lived there? I'll answer that, no. I have, not in the suburbs, downtown Chicago (South Loop). You're wrong. Since you didn't elaborate (because you have no reasoning), that's all you're getting for now.

How so?

Illinois owed UIUC somewhere around a half-billion dollars while I was a student (circa 2011). I remember my professors having to go on furlough because of this.

It's amazing how good of a school UIUC is in spite of the awful mismanagement of the state.

Out of curiosity, how familiar are you with CPS? I remember the dropout rate being ~ 50%. Apparently it is now closer to 70%.

I don't think Illinois stands up to the likes of London or New York.

Chicago Public Schools all have metal detectors. When you go through, if you don't have a gun, they give you one... rimshot.

The difference is the people of Illinois never had the foresight to discover oil.

Explain Pennsylvania then.

Unfortunately nobody's ever been able to explain Pennsylvania, it defies everyone's logic :P

Bah, the only bad thing about Pennsylvania is that you have to purchase your liquor from the government.

In Kerala (INDIA), it is the same system. But the government has esured that the menu is vast :)

It's the same in some of the provinces in Canada. I'm not sure of all of them, but at least in British Columbia and Ontario you have to buy liquor from Government owned stores, though not beer and wine... in Alberta however, you can buy liquor, beer and wine from regular private stores. At least in Ontario, whoever is in charge of procurement seems to do a relatively decent job of making sure the stores have a reasonably high quality selection, so it's not so bad. In B.C. when I lived there though, it sucked, you could barely get anything that wasn't run of the mill. Admittedly, that was 6 years ago and things may have changed since then.

It's very old.

Texas's tax structure is particularly regressive: http://itep.org/itep_reports/2013/09/texas-is-a-low-tax-stat...

40th highest overall, but 6th highest for the lowest 20%.

And apparently in Chicago you can be thrown in jail for years without trial.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/crime/20320674-418/time-stands-...

And in Texas, they execute the innocent and the mentally ill.. basing your view of an entire state on a few extreme outlier situations doesn't make much sense.

Would you define Illinois as a business friendly state? Of course not (compared to Texas). With that said, would you define it as a citizen friendly state? Again, clearly not! The only class of people Illinois is friendly to are politicians, the politically connected, and unionized labor in its death throes (note: I'm not against unions, but don't choke the golden goose to death. If you have to increase taxes to unsustainable levels to fund pensions to the point where people leave your state, you've already lost).

Just on the money and low taxes thing, it is my understanding that Texas benefits from a lot of oil tax revenue, so that may be the explanation.

Seriously, what the fuck it is with these assholes trying to pass laws that were struck down elsewhere? It happened with video game violence laws, it happened with marriage equality, and it's happening with this now.

It really should be a fineable/jailable/fireable offense to propose and pass legislation that is illegal on its face.

I dont have any evidence for this, but I bet money. I assume its expensive to draft laws. The billable time for lawyers to review legislation is not trivial.

If the money was spent to draft a law and not passed, the entity behind it would want to give it another try.

For those who don't know, Illinois politics has a reputation for many corrupt dealings - this doesn't strike me as too surprising, when they have/had multiple governors serving sentences for committing federal crimes.

Here's the last in the line of the corrupt governors who got caught: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich

Is it just me or is this site showing a blank white page?

    $ curl -vX GET http://www.illinoispolicy.org/illinois-general-assembly-revives-recording-ban/
    * Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
    *   Trying 54.236.99.104...
    * Connected to www.illinoispolicy.org (54.236.99.104) port 80 (#0)
    > GET /illinois-general-assembly-revives-recording-ban/ HTTP/1.1
    > User-Agent: curl/7.37.1
    > Host: www.illinoispolicy.org
    > Accept: */*
    >
    < HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable: Back-end server is at capacity
    < Content-Length: 0
    < Connection: keep-alive

From Google Cache: http://pastebin.com/HuGJgzbK

Right now they are leaking sensitive info while possibly fighting an outage.

Here is what the link resolves for me: http://ipweb-lb-1885590254.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/illin...