Don’t Film Me Bro: Getting Arrested for Filming People in Public Places

-By Warner Todd Huston

The law has not caught up with cell phone cameras, Flip Cameras, compact video cameras, and the electronic age. Two stories being reported last weekend prove out how the ubiquity of video capture devices are often a gray area in the law.

In one case a woman in Rochester, New York, pulled out her video camera to record the actions of a local policeman as he arrested a neighbor. As it happens, this woman was standing on her own front lawn, no where near the policeman who was going about his duties, yet this cop got incensed and arrested her anyway. He claimed she was guilty of obstruction of justice.

How this woman’s actions was interfering with the police officer is impossible to figure, but she was detained nonetheless.
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Don’t Film Me Bro: Getting Arrested for Filming People in Public Places”


More Dept. Of Education Stormtroopers: They Are Armed With Shotguns! (Seriously!)

-By Warner Todd Huston

Yesterday I wrote a short post on the story out of California that was initially reported as a local SWAT raid instigated by the Department of Education on a guy that hadn’t paid his student loans. Naturally I was outraged that the Dept. of Education had the power to arrange stormtroopers to batter down doors of people guilty only of not paying a loan on time. Since then a few particulars have changed.

Whereas the initial story claimed that the reason for the SWAT raid on the man’s home was unpaid student loans, the Dept. of Education released a statement that said this was not the case. “The Inspector General’s Office does not execute search warrants for late loan payments,” they said.
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More Dept. Of Education Stormtroopers: They Are Armed With Shotguns! (Seriously!)”