Gizmodo (of all places) does a good job of summarizing a creeping trend by law enforcement to use wiretapping laws go after citizens with the temerity to capture wrongdoing by law enforcement. Gizmodo explains:
The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.
Need an example?
A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing.
On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III’s motorcycle was pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic stop.
The case is disturbing because:
1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents’ house (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a violation of wiretapping law.
2) Baltimore criminal defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said he had never heard of the Maryland wiretap law being used in this manner. In other words, Maryland has joined the expanding trend of criminalizing the act of recording police abuse. Silverman surmises, “It’s more [about] ‘contempt of cop’ than the violation of the wiretapping law.”
3) Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley is defending the pursuit of charges against Graber, denying that it is “some capricious retribution” and citing as justification the particularly egregious nature of Graber’s traffic offenses. Oddly, however, the offenses were not so egregious as to cause his arrest before the video appeared.
Here’s the video:
Now, there’s a longer video which shows exactly why this rider deserved to get a speeding (and perhaps Riding Like a Dumbass) ticket. But wiretapping? Seriously? What an absolutely ridiculous abuse of the law. Some in Maryland want to change the law, but so long as it’s accepted as a defensive weapon for the police, I don’t think we’ll be seeing that happen anytime soon. Interest in more about this? Go check out Photography Is Not a Crime.
As part of a broad coalition of privacy groups, think tanks, technology companies, and academics, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today issued recommendations for strengthening the federal privacy law [the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986] that regulates government access to private phone and Internet communications and records, including cell phone location data.
It’s an interesting coalition of rights-advocates (who are focused on the privacy of the individual) and businesses (which would benefit from more clarity in the law insofar as it 1) reduces their costs in dealing with legal uncertainties, and 2) creates more confidence in cloud-based services). Specifically, they want to:
The group’s four recommendations focus on how to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law originally passed in 1986 before the World Wide Web was invented and when the number of American cell phone users numbered in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds of millions. The group recommends that the legal standards under which the government can obtain private communications and records be clarified and strengthened in order to:
* Better protect the privacy of communications and documents you store in the cloud
* Better protect you against secret tracking of your location through your cell phone or any other mobile device
* Better protect you against secret monitoring of when and with whom you communicate over the telephone or the Internet
* Better protect innocent Americans against government fishing expeditions through masses of communications data unrelated to a criminal suspect
This is going to be a long-term project, and I think we can expect a lot of pushback from law enforcement (both declared and those in the intelligence fields who would rather exploit the existing grey areas). But it’s a positive move.
A couple weeks ago, Sen. Rockefeller partnered with Sen. Olympia Snowe to introduce a major revision to the bill that, among other things, made changes the emergency “kill switch” provision. The revision was adopted by the committee last Thursday and the bill was approved. It’s now ready for consideration by the full Senate.
The revised bill would require the President to develop an “emergency response an restoration” plan with the help of private industry and other government agencies, but it is vague enough that it does not actually limit what the plan can include. The President would still have authority to declare an emergency and implement the plan without first seeking congressional approval, though he would have to report to Congress within 48 hours after declaring an emergency. The revised bill also doesn’t require the plan to be made public, so it could potentially give the President the same authority to restrict internet access as the original bill did, just without being explicitly and publicly stated in the legislation itself.
I’m sure people like former DNI Mike McConnell will trot out their cyberscare stories (see this great piece on how anyone using “cyber” is usually full of it.) declaring just how essential it is that we lock down the Internet. Not too long ago, McConnell was out pushing this line:
We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds. More specifically, we need to re-engineer the Internet to make attribution, geo-location, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable. The technologies are already available from public and private sources and can be further developed if we have the will to build them into our systems and to work with our allies and trading partners so they will do the same.
Re-read that sentence. He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.
Yeah, I think I’m going to pass on the advice of industry players that have devoted their lives to concealing the truth from the public. I just fear that they’ll be as successful with this effort as they have been before. That is, they never do manage to actually conceal the truth. All they need to do is convince enough of the generally-uninterested public to trust their version, and the public will go along with it. And, for the most part, that’s been a massively successful strategy. I used to think the Internet would help put an end to that. But more and more it looks like that might help put an end to the Internet.
World’s Fair Use Day (WFUD) is a free, all-day celebration of the doctrine of fair use: the legal right that allows innovators and creators to make particular uses of copyrighted materials. WFUD will take place at the Newseum in Washington D.C. on Tuesday January 12, 2010, and will be organized by Public Knowledge (PK), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit, consumer-advocacy group. PK works to ensure that communications and intellectual property policies encourage creativity, further free expression and discourse and provide universal access to knowledge. As part of its campaign to return balance to copyright law, PK hopes to use WFUD to educate the public about the importance of fair use in an information society.
That’s where I’ll be all day. Sound interesting to you? You can watch the proceedings below, and participate via the connected chat and Twitter hashtag #wfud (which I expect will be projected behind the speakers for most of the day).
This guy needs his own show, doesn’t he? But seriously, the reason it doesn’t track is grounded in a completely legit technical issue (concerning contrast), which HP says it’s addressing. You kinda wonder about a QA process that never brought this to light, though.
I was going to link to Mike@Blueweed’s excellent The Tyranny of Quaint with a bit of mocking about how he needs to write more, but I think I need to take some Windex to this glass house, first. So, here goes:
There is nothing, nada, zilch, zero, nothing, that is bad news for conservatives. When they win elections, it proves we’re a conservative country. When they lose, it proves it. When we pass health care bills, it proves it. When we lower taxes, it proves it. When we raise taxes, it proves it. Everything proves it always.
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) has proposed a variety of ideas on how to advance the [DC voting rights] bill. But the reaction from party leaders, as the Web site Politico reported, seems to be “forget it.” No doubt Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), looking ahead to his own tough reelection battle, sees no gain in irritating the powerful gun lobby. In fact, Mr. Reid voted for the Ensign amendment, making it easier for other Democrats to follow suit. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) says that she’s looking for opportunities to pass the bill, but to date that hasn’t involved pressing members to put principle ahead of political interests. President Obama, who sponsored voting rights legislation as a senator, has done nothing on the issue.
Here’s one of the “questions” asked in the poll, tailor-made for Fox News Channel:
Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd wants the FCC to force good white people in positions of power in the broadcast industry to step down to make room for more African-Americans and gays to fill those positions. Do you agree or disagree that this presents a threat to free speech?
It’s worth noting that this question only elicited 51 percent support.
Hilarious.
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The willingness of Redskins fans to support an organization that does this continues to be beyond my grasp. I’m not a football – or really even a sports – fan, but I moved to DC right after Jack Kent Cooke died in 1997, and haven’t been able to escape Redskins news since then. And you know? It’s been uniformly shitty the entire 12 years. Why, people?
If you ever leave me again,
I’ll down a bottle of
baby aspirin:
Update: Wait, forget that crap copy. Go here and enjoy the extraordinary talents of Subtle Sexuality’s fabulous KELLY KAPOOR (anderin hannon).
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Readability helps with exactly that. I like it. Very much.
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How the public lost out on the battle between Big Pharma and generics. It’s a short but informative look into one of the many battles with big consequences for the costs of health care.
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I find my stuff in the most interesting places. (Okay, it’s probably not that interesting to too many people beyond me, considering the dearth of entries. But still.)
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I know it’s supposed to be satire, but I kinda wonder if Ken Cuccinelli wrote this. Cuccinelli is the GOP candidate for Virginia Attorney General, and is such a bigot that even the normally spineless VA Log Cabin Republicans not only won’t support him, but are calling for his defeat. That link also helps illustrate why I think libertarian support for GOP candidates is misplaced (and that’s putting it very kindly):
No real libertarian has a record (like Mr. Cuccinelli does) of
· Opposition to repealing the state sodomy law, even though it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
· Opposition to allowing private companies to offer health and life insurance benefits to domestic partners of their employees
· Opposition to prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for state and local government employees
· Opposition to allowing local governments to choose what benefits they give their local employees
· Opposition to any kind of legal protections for gay and lesbian couples, even the limited rights embodied in domestic partnerships or civil unions
· Support for banning gay/straight alliances in public high schools
· Support for state funding of abstinence programs
Each one of those stupid little Gadsen flags ought to have an asterisk at the end of “Don’t Tread on Me”, leading to a “Tread On Him, Instead.” That would be a far more honest and accurate portrayal of the beliefs of the vast majority of “libertarians.”
That’s the title of this article in the latest issue of Outside magazine. The subject – the manipulation of photos – is something I’ve long thought about, but had given more consideration this year, as I started posting photos I’ve heavily processed. What made this article particularly interesting to me was the subject matter. The author created a composite photo of surfing on Oahu’s North Shore that reflected “how surfing feels to me. Not how it is.” Which is almost exactly the issue I struggled with in composing photos when I was there in March. The photo above isn’t manipulated in any meaningful way – it’s pretty much the light that fell on my camera’s sensor (there’s a slight vignetting added at the corners). But it doesn’t really capture the sheer kinetic energy that was at the center of everything, that afternoon. The manipulated composite in the Outside article? Does. So which is really telling the truth?
