ol' thunder-thighs, the Midwest's answer to Sasquatch.
He seems clueless to what the future holds for him.
Wonder when Soetoro, or whatever he goes by these days gets to open his first gulag.
Posted on 01/24/2011 6:55:47 AM PST by lbryce
Christopher Drew is a 60-year-old artist and teacher who wears a gray ponytail and lives on the North Side. Tiawanda Moore, 20, a former stripper, lives on the South Side and dreams of going back to school and starting a new life.
About the only thing these strangers have in common is the prospect that by spring, they could each be sent to prison for up to 15 years.
“That’s one step below attempted murder,” Mr. Drew said of their potential sentences.
The crime they are accused of is eavesdropping.
The authorities say that Mr. Drew and Ms. Moore audio-recorded their separate nonviolent encounters with Chicago police officers without the officers’ permission, a Class 1 felony in Illinois, which, along with Massachusetts and Oregon, has one of the country’s toughest, if rarely prosecuted, eavesdropping laws.
“Before they arrested me for it,” Ms. Moore said, “I didn’t even know there was a law about eavesdropping. I wasn’t trying to sue anybody. I just wanted somebody to know what had happened to me.”
Ms. Moore, whose trial is scheduled for Feb. 7 in Cook County Criminal Court, is accused of using her Blackberry to record two Internal Affairs investigators who spoke to her inside Police Headquarters while she filed a sexual harassment complaint last August against another police officer. Mr. Drew was charged with using a digital recorder to capture his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest for selling art without a permit on North State Street in the Loop. Mr. Drew said his trial date was April 4.
Both cases illustrate the increasingly busy and confusing intersection of technology and the law, public space and private.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Wonder when Soetoro, or whatever he goes by these days gets to open his first gulag.
And these laws not only need to be reversed,
there need to be laws that punish the government official that attempts to thwart recording of their official behavior.
Selling art without a permit? WTF???
Gee, who'da thunk it?
How about putting a rider into the next law-enforcement block-grant legislation coming out of Congress making any state with a law forbidding the recording of public officials engaged in their public duties (executive sessions of deliberative bodies and judges in chambers excluded) ineligible for any money?
Until something is done to stop the use of this tactic — tying Federal grants to State actions — by Congress in toto (which would be a good thing), our side might as well use it to advance liberty.
These laws aren’t about us, they are about protecting big brother, just like the recent secret Senate hold to prevent a vote on a law to encourage whistle blowing.
http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/11/2762059/devine-senate-hold-on-whistle.html
Call it art peddling and it makes more sense.
These laws applied to LE and public officials are designed to suppress public knowledge about corrupt practices. The FOP response is classic:
Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his organization “absolutely supports” the eavesdropping act as is and was relieved that the challenge had failed. Mr. Donahue added that allowing the audio recording of police officers while performing their duty “can affect how an officer does his job on the street.”
Citizen recording will expose corrupt practices. Why should a LE officer or public official fear recording of their work? The answer is obvious. They do not want the public to see some corrupt primarily among weak members.
Apparently these guys have something to hide.
Almost every government office now posts that cell phones are prohibited and must be turned off. The odd thing is that the rule does not apply to the workers, just the public who pays their salaries.
Every government agent, when acting in this role, should not only allow recording of their actions, both audio and video, but also be individually identifiable,
and any agent who attempts to thwart the ability to identify or record
should lose his job, pension, benefits, and be subject to criminal prosecution.
Jury nullification.
“There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilty. Now that’s the system” - Dr. Floyd Ferris
Here is another good one in Maryland where a motorcyclist with a helmet cam had his computers confiscated and his facing prison time ... all because he recorded a plain clothes officer acting like an axx.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100420/1041329109.shtml
You can’t walk down any street without smiling for someone’s camera, be it business or “public safety” and they say you can’t record a public servant doing bad stuff.
Now the government even runs around in ZBV vehicles that are running around saturating us with massive x-rays (they say insignificant). And they make it sound all wonderful. They don’t use these on the border, they use them on us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-d0HX6ibkY
1984 is here and gone.
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