It's a more fundamental issue than those legal oddities of the day. It's whether people have a right to remember, right to share their memories (there must be lots of nuances here), and whether others have a right to be forgotten or deny some or all of such sharing - and how all those play together.

I can't wait for the day brain-machine interfaces will become more advanced and commonplace (so cyborgs become something way more advanced than just limb prosthetics), and hope the day comes fast enough so the true issue is forced before any decisions are made off the ill-informed assumptions.

I have a right to collect evidence in my own defense, and that evidence may not be abrogated by by-standers to the event who might attempt to prevent me gathering that evidence.

Its the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it covers you whether you like it or not, thankfully. You might not like it but thats gonna change the moment you need to exercise that very right yourself.

How do you figure? There is no "right to record," nor is surveillance mentioned in the Declaration of Human Rights. In fact, it points out in Article 12 and 29 that rights and freedoms can and should be limited by law if they impinge on the rights and freedoms of others, such as those mentioned in Article 12:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

That doesn't seem as clear cut as you're implying.

Article 19:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Seeking and receiving information covers gathering facts, evidence, or observations from public events or spaces (e.g., documenting protests, government actions, police conduct, or everyday occurrences visible in public).

You might not like it, but its a key mechanism by which we, the people, keep despots and the police state in check.

I do like it, and agree it's an important mechanism, but it's not a blank check as it's in tension with the other articles. I do not read that as granting you the right to any and all information you might desire. For instance, I hope we can agree that allowing the public to film bathrooms or gynecology appointments crosses a line.

Oh, there are always going to need to be exceptions to the rights, such as the tacit contract one enters into, abrogating the right to record, when entering a privacy-respecting space that is marked as such and is not part of the public commons but rather that of a private entity whose intent was to create a private bathroom in which people are definitely not to record each others activities without additional contract - i.e. consent - of all parties involved.

But it still has to be iterated in light of such exceptions, that the rights encoded in the UDHR are there to protect humanity, as a species, so that we can indeed form our own cultures freely as we see fit.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has as much teeth as The New Colossus does. It's a bunch of prose with absolutely no binding or enforcement mechanisms.

Following the notion that one needs force to get things done is rather a tempestuous path to take.

The rights are there for all of us, and indeed they are generally aligned along natural human phenemonen, specifically for the purpose of allowing the weak and the strong to live as equals, universally.

Sure, you have the right as long as you have the gun. But you still have the rights once you lose the gun too, human.