Watching the detectives
by digby
Judge Richard A. Posner isn’t known for his genteel treatment of parties whose arguments he doesn’t agree with. When an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union began to make his opening statement at a Tuesday oral argument, Posner cut him off after 14 words. “Yeah, I know,” he said dismissively. “But I’m not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples’ encounters with the police.”
The topic was the constitutionality of the unusually strict Illinois wiretapping law, which makes it illegal to record someone without his consent even if the recording is done openly and in a public place. The ACLU was asking a panel of three judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to strike down the law on First Amendment grounds.
But Judge Posner wasn’t having it. “Once all this stuff can be recorded, there’s going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers,” he said.
He was particularly worried that allowing recording would impact police work. “I’m always suspicious when the civil liberties people start telling the police how to do their business,” he said. He speculated that gangs would love the ACLU’s argument because recordings would make it easier to discover and retaliate against informants.
Do you ever get the feeling that conservatives aren’t even trying to make a cogent argument anymore?
The article goes on to say that the other judges on the panel were a little less hostile to the idea that the police should not be afraid to have their public behavior on the job recorded.
But this is an ongoing argument that doesn’t even seem to phase most people: apparently it’s too much to ask that the police follow the law because it makes their jobs so much harder.
.