De-FUD: Once More With Wiretapping June 4, 2010
Gizmodo posted a story about people being prosecuted for recording police encounters. The story beings with this gem:
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.
Those two sentences are almost entirely wrong. One of the states they discuss is Massachusetts. While there have been several high profile cases where people have been arrested for recording police officers, the mere act of recording a police officer is not illegal, nor was any law passed in response to police videos being posted on line.
The law Gizmodo is talking about is the Massachusetts wiretapping act, M. G. L. c. 272, ยง 99. The act was passed in it’s current form in 1968, and largely mirrors the Federal wiretapping act. The act makes it illegal to secretly intercept an oral communication. The cases were people have been successfully prosecuted for violating the act have been where the defendant concealed or hid their recording device. Massachusetts courts have repeatedly held that any type of obvious recording is not illegal, nor would it be illegal to just record video without sound. And there is certainly no law that prohibits recording police officers specifically.
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