Blog Law Blog

As Blog Law Blog continues it’s look back at 2011, I’d like to note a very good wrap-up article over at PBS’s MediaShift:

• Rob Arcamona, Jeff Hermes and Andy Sellars: Wiretapping, SOPA, Occupy: 2011 Was a Tumultuous Year in Media Law

The article covers the principal stories in media law over the past year, and it does a nice job of hitting the important topics, but the legal analysis isn’t always right on. I’ll just look at one example – what the article lists as the number-one topic in media law over 2011: “‘Wiretapping’ the Police.”

“Wiretapping” sounds like it should involve a man in a headset sitting in a van listening in on your telephone calls. But the legal definition is often far broader — as many journalists and ordinary citizens found out after being charged with a felony for simply filming a few seconds of police activity in public.

It’s true that laws against making surreptitious audio recordings do go well beyond classic “wiretapping,” but I’m aware of no law that purports to make criminal “filming” police activity taking place in public. The an Illinois statute mentioned in the article prohibits recording audio of any conversation without the consent of all persons speaking. That was used against someone with a video camera that was also capturing sound, but the case was ultimately dropped, and it’s not clear that any recent prosecutions have happened under similar circumstances.

In general, however, the problem is not laws themselves – the problem is police arresting people for conduct that does not violate any law.

For instance, when attorney Simon Glik used his cell phone to record Boston Police officers arresting a homeless man in a public park, the officers arrested Glik under a law (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99) that prohibits “secretly” recording wire or oral communications. Glik wasn’t being secret. He was recording openly. His conduct didn’t violate the law. The problem there was that police were arresting Glik for doing something that wasn’t against the law. Indeed, the charges were soon dismissed. (Post-dismissal, Glik filed a lawsuit that successfully established constitutional rights to make such recordings as well.)

Another instance of this coming up – not mentioned in the PBS article – was the Baltimore Police’s action against Christopher Sharp, who recorded the arrest and apparent abuse of a woman at the Preakness Stakes. The problem there was not that Maryland law prohibited Sharp’s conduct – it didn’t. The problem was that the police seized Sharp’s cellphone on the spot and deleted a bunch of videos (including personal ones as well as the one of the police). At the time, one police officer made the completely absurd claim that it is “illegal to record anybody’s voice or anything else in the state of Maryland.” But, as I explained, that’s not the law.

That’s why the article kind of misses the point when it says:

The importance of the wiretapping cases cannot be overstated. If the government is permitted to prosecute citizens for collecting and disseminating accurate information about acts of official misconduct, specifically when those acts occur in a public place, both citizen and professional journalism — and by extension the public at large — will suffer greatly.

The problem is not the prosecutions. The prosecutions almost never happen. The problem is the police acting lawlessly on the scene.