http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/06/201162114131825860.html

US police smash camera for recording killing

By Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 21 Jun 2011 16:34

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but Narces Benoit's decision to videotape a shooting by Miami police landed him in jail after officers smashed his cell-phone camera.

It was 4am on May 30 when Benoit and his girlfriend Erika Davis saw officers firing dozens of bullets into a car driven by Raymond Herisse, a suspect who hit a police officer and other vehicles while driving recklessly. Herisse died in the hail of lead, and four bystanders also suffered gunshot wounds, the Miami Herald newspaper reported.

Police noticed the man filming the shooting and an officer jumped into his truck, and put a pistol to his head, Benoit said. The video shows officers crowding around Herisse's vehicle before opening fire, followed by indistinguishable yelling at onlookers, including Benoit, to stop filming.

"My phone was smashed, he stepped on it, handcuffed me," the 35-year-old car stereo technician told CNN.

Despite his phone being destroyed, Benoit was able to save the footage by taking the memory card out of the device and putting it in his mouth before handing it over to police, he said, adding that officers smashed several other cameras in the chaos which followed the shooting.

Legal issues

"There are two questions at play here that need to be separated," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California. "One is: to what extent is it illegal to record officers doing their duties? And secondly, did the police destroy someone's property and evidence?"

"Whether or not the recording was illegal, the police conduct as alleged would be illegal in any case," Volokh told Al Jazeera. In Florida, it is legal to record conversations, unless the conversation is "confidential", which this public altercation likely was not, Volokh said.

Technology 'outpacing' laws

While visual evidence, through government surveillance cameras and individuals' phones, can help make prosecutions, police unions and likeminded groups argue that police officers might second-guess themselves if they know they are being recorded and delay making necessary decisions. There are also arguments about privacy; mainly that conversations between private individuals and security forces should not be recorded by third parties.

And even though Eugene Volokh and other legal experts believe recording public police activities isn't a crime in Florida, that doesn’t mean police are happy about it.

"In the United States, the laws about the recording of police activity vary considerably from state to state. In Massachusetts, for example, existing laws that forbid recording someone without their permission have been extended to prohibit the recording of police. In Illinois, the law now explicitly bans the recording of police," Cascio told Al Jazeera. "I believe that citizens should have the right to record the actions of officials on duty; Citizens can't really fight back when they see police misconduct, their only tool is the ability to document the misbehaviour."

Some experts argue that laws, often designed to deal with audio wiretapping of telephone conversations and now applied to video recordings, are not keeping pace with new technologies. Volokh, however, is not one of those people.

"It isn't a technical question; it might be a question about basic values," Volokh, the legal scholar, said. "How much do you value people’s ability to gather the news and how much you value privacy?"

There was a highly publicized case here in Maryland where a state policeman pulled over a speeding motorcycle and the guy riding the bike had a camera on top of his helmet.

He faced 16 years in prison for violating the Maryland law on wiretapping. The outcome of the case was somewhat surprising.

Here is an excerpt from the Washington Post:



Charges dismissed against Md. man who taped traffic stop
By Annys Shin

A Harford County Circuit Court judge Monday dismissed wiretapping charges against Anthony Graber, a motorcyclist who was jailed briefly after he taped a Maryland state trooper who stopped him for speeding on I-95. Graber used a camera mounted on his helmet, then posted the video on YouTube.

In April, a few weeks after the traffic stop, Harford County state's attorney Joseph I. Cassilly charged Graber, a staff sergeant in the Maryland Air National Guard and a computer systems engineer, with violating the state's wiretapping law. That law dates back to the 1970s and was originally intended to protect citizens from government intrusions into their privacy. If convicted on all charges, Graber faced up to 16 years in prison.

Judge Emory A. Pitt Jr. had to decide whether police performing their duties have an expectation of privacy in public space. Pitt ruled that police can have no such expectation in their public, on-the-job communications.

Pitt wrote: "Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public. When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation. 'Sed quis custodiet ipsos cutodes' ("Who watches the watchmen?”)."


http://blog.washingtonpost.com/story-lab/2010/09/wiretapping_charges_dropped_ag.html?hpid=moreheadlines

The question brought up in the following article is whether individuals have the same right as law making (federal) and law enforcement (state) agencies to use technology to protect themselves and others from illegal and unethical behavior enacted in the name of law enforcement?

confusion here. individuals have rights. law makers and law inforcement agencies have NO rights. rights we are born with and in this country "we [individuals with rights] the people" assign power and authority to various branches of government to do certain things. one of those things is to curtail some rights of the individual that are not what we define as an "inalienable" right. we speek freely but we've no right to drive seventy mph through a school zone. so the answer to the question is no. individuals do not have similar rights as government agencies as government agencies have no rights. on the other hand, individuals do not have the power or authority that government agencies have as "we the people" assigned no power or authority to any individual. we hate the king thing you see.

In the criminal law realm, Fourth Amendment "search and seizure" protections extend to:

• A law enforcement officer's physical apprehension or "seizure" of a person, by way of a stop or arrest; and

• Police searches of places and items in which an individual has a legitimate expectation of privacy -- his or her person, clothing, purse, luggage, vehicle, house, apartment, hotel room, and place of business, to name a few examples.

The Fourth Amendment provides safeguards to individuals during searches and detentions, and prevents unlawfully seized items from being used as evidence in criminal cases. The degree of protection available in a particular case depends on the nature of the detention or arrest, the characteristics of the place searched, and the circumstances under which the search takes place.

I think anything posted by an individual in a public forum is fair ground. I think anything an individual is involved in in a public place should be fair ground.

I think what people do on private property should be subject to some legal protection and laws which regulate when and how that protection can be infringed upon.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/22-8

Published on Wednesday, June 22, 2011 by Save the Internet
Apple's Pre-Emptive Strike Against Free Speech

by Tim Karr

So you think you control your smartphone? Think again.
Late last week reports uncovered a plan by Apple, manufacturer of the iPhone, to patent technology that can detect when people are using their phone cameras and shut them down.

Apple says this technology was intended to stop people from recording video at live concerts, which should worry the creative commons crowd. But a remote "kill switch" has far more sinister applications in the hands of repressive governments. And it further raises concerns about the power new media companies hold over our right to connect and communicate.

Imagine if Apple's device had been available to the Mubarak regime earlier this year, and Egyptian security forces had deployed it around Tahrir Square to disable cameras just before they sent in their thugs to disperse the crowd.

Thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa have used cellphone cameras to document human rights abuses and share them with millions via social media.

In a February speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton credited the viral spread of a cellphone video depicting the shooting death of a young Iranian woman named Neda for bringing world attention to the human rights abuses of the regime.

What would we know of Neda's shocking death had Iranian security forces disabled that camera?

Social Media's Wild West
But here's the rub. The First Amendment and Article 19 of the U.N.'s Declaration on Human Rights don't really apply to the corporations that build these cellphones and run these social networks. Free speech rules don't apply to Silicon Valley.

And while platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr might enable individual expression more than governments do, many governments are at least accountable by law for protecting your right to speech and assembly.

The social networks are only beholden to their terms of service, which in most cases extend them the power to take down your communications "for any or no reason."

A Pre-emptive Strike
What Apple is proposing to develop is worse in many ways. Its cellphone camera kill switch can be used as a pre-emptive strike against free speech.

In its patent application, Apple describes the technology as making it impossible to capture video or pictures at events where cameras and video recorders are prohibited. Your phone determines whether an image includes an infrared beam with encoded data. This data is sent from an emitter that directs the cellphone or a similar device to shut down image capture. Disabling emitters could be mounted on stages, throughout public squares or, conceivably, on police helmets.
Smartphones like the iPhone and Droid are becoming extensions of ourselves. They are not simply tools to connect with friends and family, but a means to document the world around us, engage in political issues and organize with others. They literally put the power of the media in our own hands.

Apple's proposed technology would take that power away.