Thursday, December 11, 2014

Conservatives: it is not conservative to immediately do whatever an armed representative of the state tells you. Or to approve of the punishment of anyone who does not.

It is not Conservative to lick government jack boots. It is not American to instinctively take the side of state violence and coercion. Prussian? Japanese? Yes. But Traditional American conservative? No. Quit kissing armed bureaucrat assess or kiss our Republic goodbye.  Liberals are the people that want to maximize the power of the state and to do that they needs lots of policing.  "Law and Order" conservatism is "Appeasing and Facilitating Liberal Goals" conservatism.  You're not getting "tough", you're getting "had".

Illinois is attempting to resurrect what the state’s politicians pretend is a privacy-protecting anti-surveillance law; in reality, it is the nearly identical reincarnation of the state’s earlier anti-recording law, the main purpose of which was to charge people who record police encounters with a felony, an obvious and heavy-handed means of discouraging such recording. Illinois’s state supreme court threw the law out on the grounds that police do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when carrying out their duties, though police and politicians argued the contrary — apparently, some part of the meaning of the phrase “public servants” eludes them. The new/old law is, by design, maddeningly vague, and will leave Illinois residents unsure of which encounters may be legally recorded and which may not.

Here is the solution: Pass a law explicitly recognizing the right of citizens to record police officers. It is important to note that such a law would recognize a right rather than create one: Government has no legitimate power to forbid free people from using cameras, audio-recording devices, or telephones in public to document the business of government employees. The statute would only clarify that Americans — even in Illinois — already are entitled to that right.

This is not a theoretical concern: A woman in the great progressive bastion of Massachusetts is very possibly prison-bound for the crime of turning on the audio recording feature of her mobile phone when being arrested.

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