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  • 2014-12-09 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Illinois Make It a Felony for Citizens to Record the Police? (en)
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  • On 9 December 2014, The Free Thought Project published an article referencing the Illinois state legislature's passage of an amendment to Senate Bill 1342, which dealt with the recording of oral conversations between two or more persons: Although it was widely characterized as such, the legislation did not establish a new law specifically prohibiting citizens from recording police officers. Rather, the bill made it a felony to surreptitiously record any private conversation (defined as any oral communication between 2 or more persons, where at least one person involved had a reasonable expectation of privacy), with greater penalties for recording such conversations when they involved law enforcement officers (including not just police but also state attorneys and judges). The legislation was intended to replace a previous eavesdropping law that had been struck down by the state Supreme Court: According to critics, however, the new law was nearly as bad as the old one and was intended to effectively prohibit citizens from recording police officers in performance of their duties by making the meaning and application of the eavesdropping law so opaque: However, the element of the bill regarding recording of police activities was praised by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who interpreted it as protecting (rather than discouraging) a citizen's right to film on-duty officers: We cannot be arrested or prosecuted under the new statute for recording on-duty government officials who are talking to the public as part of their jobs, because those conversations are not private. The new statute respects the appellate court ruling in the case the ACLU brought against the Cook County State's Attorney's Office: on-duty police officers have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their conversations in public places. Democratic Senators Kwame Raoul and Elaine Nekritz, who wrote the amendment to Senate Bill 1342, believed the bill, which focused more on private conversations, would fix the issues previously addressed by the Illinois Supreme Court: The most important thing the bill does is to restore Illinois to a standard that requires everyone in a private conversation to consent to a recording. We satisfy the Supreme Court requirement by limiting that to conversations where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. This reasonable expectation of privacy, however, would not apply to law enforcement officials in certain situations. The Associated Press reported the new legislation would make it easier for police to eavesdrop without a warrant: The bill allows police, with only permission from the state's attorney, to surreptitiously record conversations for 24 hours when investigating such serious crimes as murder, the most heinous sexual assaults, kidnapping, human trafficking and others. The bill was approved by Illinois' governor, and took effect, on 30 December 2014. (en)
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