Posted on 08/05/2006 2:29:25 PM PDT by Brian Mosely
NASHUA – Police won’t prosecute a man for using his home security system to record detectives on his front porch, Nashua Police Chief Timothy Hefferan announced Friday.
Michael Gannon was arrested June 27 after he made the videotape to record conversations among detectives who were at his door looking for his 15-year-old son, who was being investigated in connection with a mugging downtown. When Gannon brought the videotape to a police station to complain that a detective was rude to him, he was arrested on felony wiretapping charges.
The case attracted attention around the world, as news spread via the Internet. The Telegraph and city police received scores of phone calls and e-mails condemning the charges.
In addition to dropping the case against him, Nashua police also have concluded that Gannon’s complaint about the detective was justified, although the chief added that Gannon himself was “provocative” and “disrespectful.” The chief declined to say what discipline the detective might face.
(Excerpt) Read more at nashuatelegraph.com ...
Government only wants to be able to tape us constantly. They don't want it the other way around.
This raises the question as to how "respectful" one is required to be to cops on your front porch when there's no warrant involved.
Moral: Do not challenge your overlords without expecting consequences.
Government: They don't have to be right. They can use guns.
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| It is a crime under state law (RSA 570-A:2) to use any sort of electronic device to eavesdrop or record conversations without the consent of everyone involved. Doesn't this law make every TV cameraman a criminal? I was recording my granddaughter's birthday party at a restaurant and didn't have consent of everyone involved. Maybe I should turn myself in. :) |
I've got them all hooked to a VCR locked in my safe just in case like.
What I really want to figure out how to do is hook it to my computer and then upload the video and audio files to a website on a regular basis.
If there's no tape in the house, there's nothing to confiscate. As an added bonus if I ever need to the files could be widely distributed in a couple of seconds.
Any ideas?
L
Sound - not OK. Video is OK. So you can video your neighbor sunning herself in the backyard. Just don't record your own background comments, or someone else's.
The law was written when videotaping was unheard of.
I have a neat security camera recording to my hard drive 24/7. I plan on adding at least one more camera. Luekwerks - got it at Frey's Electronics.
No wire was tapped. Wiretapping originated from people connecting their own wire (a tap) to a telegraph line, and later to telephone lines, to eavesdrop on private conversations.
Notice that the charges were dropped against the homeowner...he doesn't even need a little "all conversations have consent to be recorded" sign on his porch.
Notice also that the police were rude not only at his door, but also down at the station where they tossed bogus charges at *him* when he dared complain (with evidence!) about their behavior.
Automobile security systems are now making recordings, too...this sort of issue may have reared its head due to a home security system, but this won't be the end of police being surprised that their ordinarily private rants are now being recorded.
...But the real progress toward freedom will be made when all government bureaucrats are recorded and webcast live during their full work days.
Get out the aluminum foil...
In my state you can record video but not audio without consent.
JBT's every step of the way.
If you're lucky they'll use a gun. They can ruin your life, subject you to AIDS through prison rape, destroy your credit rating, and cause you to lose your house without firing a shot.
I'm risking jail by admitting that I took video at my nephew's 2nd birthday party.
Does this mean that Hard Copy and Maximum Exposure will be taken off the TV immediately?
Sure, and getting hammered by blogs and message boards the world over and receiving enough e-mail to shut down their server had nothing to do with it.
If it wasn't for the Pajama Patrol, this guy would've been railroaded. When you turn on the lights, the cockroaches scatter and their prime target of opportunity stops looking so good.
I may be wrong, but I am not sure one needs a warrant to be on another's front porch. There does not seem, to me at least, the expectation of privacy while on the porch.
Seems he followed the law but it was not good enough for the DA. He should sue the police department for the replacement and removal of the cameras. After all it was his property.
Below is an very interesting article.
Living in the United States post-Sept. 11 gets more Kafkaesque all the time.
Ol' Franz would have snickered plenty as the Bush administration repeatedly overstretched to assume more power for the executive branch. There have been many well-publicized episodes – the Patriot Act giving the government power to review what people check out of libraries; the president's authorization of secret eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency without a warrant; the decision to hold terror suspects at Guantánamo as "enemy combatants," a classification that denies them the protection of international standards of treatment; the administration's defense of torture.
Jane Mayer, in a recent issue of The New Yorker, quotes historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on the subject. Mr. Schlesinger, she writes, "believes that Bush 'is more grandiose than Nixon.' "
Ms. Mayer also quotes Republican legal activist Bruce Fein, who says that David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and architect of the administration's strategy to brush aside legal restraints on its power, has "staked out powers that are a universe beyond any other Administration."
The Bush administration's reach has also extended into the obscure corners of the academic world, where they have veered toward the absurdist.
In 2004, the U.S. Justice Department asked the Federal Communications Commission to reinterpret a 1994 law so federal agents could more easily wiretap Internet-based communication, and the FCC complied. Some cried foul, arguing that the commission had no legal authority to expand a law beyond Congress's original intent.
"We did think their application was very aggressive and had not been contemplated by Congress when they passed the law," said Matthew Brill, a lawyer hired by the American Council on Education to fight the FCC ruling.
Here's the kicker: To comply with the new ruling, each university would have to spend millions of dollars to change its routers and switches to make it easier for the FBI to eavesdrop on student and faculty e-mail and Web-based telephone communication.
It's as if the federal government came to you and said, "We're going to make you more safe from terrorism, so we want you to install dozens of video cameras in your home so we can keep an eye on your activity. Oh, and you have to pay for the equipment yourself."
Today's college students seem generally more buttoned-down than their predecessors from the 1960s and have made little noise about the recent assaults on constitutional freedoms. Imagine what students of the turbulent '60s would have done if they had known the government was forcing colleges to make it easier for federal agents to read student and faculty e-mail (assuming there had been e-mail then).
The 1994 law in question, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, had directed traditional telephone companies to install equipment that made it easy for law enforcement to conduct wiretaps. The FCC expanded the law to include Internet-based communication, even though Congress exempted Internet technology in the original law.
The actual authority to wiretap was not an issue – that power was provided through older laws from 1968 and 1978. The FCC ruling just makes it easier for law enforcement to wiretap Internet communication without actually having to go to a campus and work directly with campus technicians.
The American Council on Education estimated it would cost colleges nationwide up to $7 billion total to make the upgrades, and yet the number of wiretaps at college campuses is negligible.
"We felt very strongly the costs would be unnecessary because we always provide prompt assistance for requests to do surveillance," said Kamran Khan, vice provost for information technology at Rice University.
The American Council on Education went to court to fight the FCC ruling. But in a 2-1 verdict last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with the FCC, saying it could broaden the scope of the 1994 law.
The colleges see a silver lining in the ruling: The court case brought forth a brief filed by the FCC that said the new regulations apply only to the connection between the external Internet and a university's computer system, not the individual connections within a school's Intranet. That will make compliance cheaper. For Rice, with 60 buildings, changing every router and switch would have been a huge financial headache, since the school has just finished rewiring much of the campus.
In the dissenting opinion, Senior Judge Harry Edwards said the FCC, when deciding to extend the scope of the law, "apparently forgot to read the words of the statute," because it "does not give the FCC unlimited authority to regulate every telecommunications service that might conceivably be used to assist law enforcement."
"What we see in this case," he wrote, "is an agency attempting to squeeze authority from a statute that does not give it. The FCC's interpretation ... manufactures broad new powers out of thin air."
Judge Edwards was speaking specifically about the FCC's tactics, but his words could just as easily describe the Bush administration's broader pattern of overreaching across the board.
The FCC has not yet decided whether it will make education networks entirely exempt from the ruling. It would be a nice first step if the Bush administration wants to convince Americans they won't ultimately be terrorized by their own government's overreach
Apparently parting their hair with a warning shot would be going to far............
This could be done with a cheap laptop (probably 500-700 on eBay), an ATI TV Wonder USB 2.0, and some software (don't know exactly what to suggest offhand, and I'm too lazy to do the research right now, but I'm pretty sure that there's a package out there that could be made to work). I suggest a laptop so that you can dedicate the computer to this function and not have to worry about keeping your desktop up and running all the time.
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