CopBlock.org Founder Faces 21 Years in Prison for Reporting Police Brutality

Re:CopBlock.org Founder Faces 21 Years in Prison for Reporti... by jarrett on Sunday August 05, 2012 @07:10PM (#4342974)

The main reasons behind this law have nothing to do with police work or public officials, actually. Two-party consent wiretapping laws generally apply regardless of who's on the other end. You could get charged for recording your own grandmother, not just a cop. (At least in principle you could, though it probably wouldn't happen.)

So why were these laws enacted? Basically to protect privacy. State legislatures decided that surreptitious recording of one's one phone calls was an invasion of the other person's privacy. I personally am against these laws, but that's the rationale behind them. It's not about protecting cops in particular.

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Re:CopBlock.org Founder Faces 21 Years in Prison for Reporti... by pessimizer on Sunday August 05, 2012 @07:53PM (#4343082)

I think these laws were enacted solely to protect deeply corrupt systems, but I might be biased because I live in Illinois. With laws like this, administration-connected people can be openly corrupt, because the collection of evidence against them is in itself evidence of a crime.

No one is prosecuted for corruption in Illinois unless they become a roadblock in some way to someone with more clout (after which they resign and charges are quietly dropped), or the Feds come to town.

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Re:CopBlock.org Founder Faces 21 Years in Prison for Reporti... by adrianmsmith on Monday August 06, 2012 @11:09AM (#4345496)

"Basically to protect privacy. ... I personally am against these laws"

But if there weren't these laws, surely every time you use the phone to anyone (e.g. your wife), you'd have to treat everything you say as if it were public. Because the other party could be recording you and could then make the recording public, and there'd be nothing you could do about it.

Surely that's not a thing you'd want?

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