rocklin wrote:PST wrote:
. . . the Illinois eavesdropping statute is not about anything it has actually been used for, but instead about what people speculate it could be used for.
Please call Mr. Drew and explain to him and his family that, hey, no worries about 15 years in prison, it's just people
speculating.
Do the same for Ms. Moore.
Hi rocklin,
I'm going to call unfair ellipsis on you. What I said was that "
most of the concern about the Illinois eavesdropping statute is not about anything it has actually been used for, but instead about what people speculate it could be used for." By that I meant that there are a bunch of newspaper stories claiming that in a few weeks, when the G8 summit comes to town, protesters can be arrested under the eavesdropping law if they attempt to video record what the police are doing. The implication is that we could have 1968 all over again, and that no one dare pull out their iPhones if the cops start wailing on protesters the way they did back in the day.
That is the concern I called speculative, both because the law on its face only applies to audio recording of conversations, and because to the best of my knowledge it has not been used in that way. I did not imply that Mr. Drew and Ms. Moore didn't have something serious to worry about.
It is useful, however, to recall the facts of their cases, how different they are from what people are being led to fear, and what the results have been to date for them. Mr. Drew set out to be arrested to protest another law. It took him four tries before anyone bothered. He had a friend with him to record his arrest, which she did, and she posted it on YouTube. It sure looks to me like they did this openly, but you can judge for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72_ZzJC ... ata_player. I live here and have seen nothing in the papers suggesting that Nancy Bechtol, whose name is on the video, go in any hot water about it. However, Mr. Drew was also carrying a digital audio recorder in one of his bags. The Times story notes: "A few feet away, a friend of Mr. Drew's recorded the encounter on a video camera and later posted it on YouTube. At the police station, Mr. Drew's Olympus recorder was discovered. It was still recording." (
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/us/23 ... wanted=all) So the case involves this bugaboo that forms a common thread for cases under this act, surreptitious recording of events in the police station. Maybe that shouldn't be banned either, but you can understand the police being sensitive to the possibility of the mafia or other organized gang bugging the squad room or tapping its phones. In any event, as we all know, Judge Sacks threw the case out last week, although Mr. Drew isn't out of the woods yet. (I should add that I cannot say with certainty how broad the indictment was in this case, and whether it included the audio recording on the scene. Press accounts can be pretty sloppy, so I'd feel more confident if I could find the opinion.)
Ms. Moore is out of the woods. A jury acquitted her. According to the Times story and the Chicago Sun-Times, she secretly recorded her conversation with police on her Blackberry in the police station. Now she is suing the City of Chicago. (
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/1000 ... -city.html)
At the risk of being incredibly tedious, I want to point out again what I was contending, and then I, like my damp feline friend, plan to drop this. I'm not out to applaud this law even when confined narrowly to what it appears to have been designed for. I support the proposed amendment. All I was trying to say is that I think stories like that in Russia Today, which is what I responded to originally, are contrived and sensationalistic insofar as they suggest that the law allows protesters to be arrested for taking videos of police conduct, something they plan to do (and have every right to do, in my opinion) during the upcoming G8 summit. This law is aimed at something different.