[From the Cato Institute Blog]
Posted: 28 Sep 2010 08:47 AM PDT
By David Rittgers
Maryland Circuit Court Judge Emory A Pitt, Jr. has ruled that motorcyclist and Maryland Air National Guardsman Anthony Graber did not violate the Maryland wiretapping statute when he recorded his traffic stop. The wiretap law does prohibit the recording of audio where there is (NOT) a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” but Judge Pitt found that a police officer performing a traffic stop has no such expectation of privacy.
“Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public,” the judge wrote. “When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation.”
As I said in this op-ed, and as Clark Neily, Radley Balko and I pointed out in this video, Maryland police officers have used the “expectation of privacy” claim as a tool to deter anyone from recording on-duty police officers. In Anthony Graber’s case, a Maryland state trooper cut off Graber in an unmarked car and emerged from the driver’s side door in jeans and a gray pullover, gun drawn and badge not visible. It looked like a carjacking, and Graber was not charged for recording the encounter until he posted it on YouTube. The message to other Marylanders was clear: record the police, and you will face arrest and felony prosecution.
The prosecutor behind the case against Graber, Joseph Cassilly, spoke on a panel last week at Cato. He made clear that he disagreed with the structure of the Maryland wiretapping law, and was using the case to push the legislature toward a single-party consent wiretap statute. While I agree with a move to a single-party consent law, it is satisfying to see the charges against Anthony Graber reduced to the traffic violations that instigated the encounter in the first place.
Judge Dismisses Wiretapping Charges against Motorcyclist for Recording Traffic Stop is a post from http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/
[From Reason.com by Radley Balko, September 20, 2010, original article here]
Additional related reading:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/TheLaw/videotaping-cops-arrest/story?id=11179076
http://hurtyoubad.com/?p=7781
http://readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=50153
http://www.aclu.org/racial-justice_prisoners-rights_drug-law-reform
_immigrants-rights/fighting-police-abuse-community-ac
http://www.aclu-md.org/aPress/Press2010/Graber_Factsheet.pdf
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11861
http://www.freewebs.com/policemisconduct/
http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/
http://www.law.suffolk.edu/highlights/stuorgs/lawreview/documents/Skehill
_Note_Final.pdf
http://www.lawcollective.org/article.php?id=94
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/headline/are-cameras-the-new-guns/
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2008566,00.html
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A guide to the technology for keeping government accountable
This summer the issue of recording on-duty police officers has received a great deal of media attention. Camera-wielding citizens were arrested in Maryland, Illinois, and Massachusetts under interpretations of state wiretapping laws, while others were arrested in New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Florida, and elsewhere based on vaguer charges related to obstructing or interfering with a police officer.
So far Massachusetts is the only state to explicitly uphold a conviction for recording on-duty cops, and Illinois and Massachusetts are the only states where it is clearly illegal. The Illinois law has yet to be considered by the state’s Supreme Court, while the Massachusetts law has yet to be upheld by a federal appeals court. Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler recently issued an opinion concluding that arrests for recording cops are based on a misreading of the state’s wiretapping statute, but that opinion isn’t binding on local prosecutors.
In the remaining 47 states, the law is clearer: It is generally legal to record the police, as long as you don’t physically interfere with them. You may be unfairly harassed, questioned, or even arrested, but it’s unlikely you will be charged, much less convicted. (These are general observations and should not be treated as legal advice.)
One reason this issue has heated up recently is that the democratization of technology has made it easier than ever for just about anyone to pull out a camera and quickly document an encounter with police. So what’s the best way to record cops? Here is a quick rundown of the technology that’s out there.
[From the John Birch Society, original article here ]
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Help Stop Virtual Strip-search Legislation
Oh yes, those legislative busybody scanners are at it again, mandating that full body imaging x-ray devices be installed in every airport in the nation by 2013, under the illusory premise of increasing safety.
This is another unconstitutional tactic that Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to, but that doesn’t bother Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) who introduced S. 3536, the Securing Aircraft From Explosives Responsibly: Advanced Imaging Recognition Act of 2010, (SAFER AIR Act). “To enhance aviation security and protect personal privacy, and for other purposes,” is the leading line of the SAFE AIR bill text.
The goal of the bill must be “for other purposes,” because there will be no personal privacy when more and more travelers, both adults and children, are singled out for an extra security check that is in reality a revealing sneak peek at their anatomy, minus their clothes. Spending millions and millions of taxpayer dollars on more machines will do little to “enhance aviation security,” either, as it as already been established that the Detroit bomber’s explosives would not have been detected by such a machine, and even firecrackers have been missed.
[From HALC member Laura B]
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http://nutrientscure.wordpress.com
Introduction
Alternative medicine clearly has won the battle of truth about healing on the Internet during the past ten years.
So much has changed regarding alternative medicine on the Internet in the past decade. Its presence has exploded exponentially. And so has its depth of healing knowledge. (It has found many cures, when none existed before.) 
Alternative medicine has “trumped” conventional drug-oriented medicine in the past decade, as far as the truth is concerned. If you perform a “simple linking search” on the Internet typing in whatever illness you may have, and precede it with the words “alternative medicine” or “integrative medicine” (without the quote marks), and then compare what you find to what conventional medicine has to offer for the very same illness, the aforementioned fact will often be clear.
Does this mean that alternative medicine is going to replace conventional drug-oriented medicine in a very big way, as it justifiably should?
Not necessarily.
It is up to the law.
Alternative vs. Governmental Medicine
Federal law in America favors ONLY conventional drug-oriented medicine at this point. (“Governmental medicine” is the appropriate term for the latter. Governmental medicine and conventional drug-oriented are synonymous, for the former mandates the latter.) 
Federal law does so with its ridiculous FDA mandate that states “ONLY A DRUG can prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure ALL disease”. (Based on reality, this is nuts!)
In taking the above position, federal law is also mandating the reverse; NO NUTRIENT, NUTRITIONAL SUPPLEMENT, ***OR*** NATURAL MEASURE is allowed to prevent, diagnose, treat, or cure ANY disease”. (Based on reality, this is nuts!)
Jason Chen: Gizmodo
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals just decided that it was legal for the police to put a GPS tracking device on your car, sitting in your driveway, on your property. Here’s how to protect yourself.
Matt’s post about the decision explains in depth about the ruling. To quickly summarize, the supreme court had said before that police can look through things that anyone in the public could come across, meaning, your driveway is freely accessible to the public, hence, the cops can look through it. The 9th circuit court now says that cops can shove a GPS locator onto your car, because the area is publicly accessible and you have no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Then said cops can use the GPS track you. Without a warrant.
(Updated above text to improve clarity.)
How do you stop this without combing over the underside—or perhaps even inside—of your car and finding the GPS tracker? With technology. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on the car parked in your driveway, tracking everywhere you go. It doesn’t violate your rights, at all—according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, Arizona, Oregon and a bunch of the western US, has ruled that the government did nothing wrong when the DEA planted a GPS tracking device on Juan Pineda-Moreno’s Jeep, which was parked in his driveway—without a search warrant. The underpinning for the ruling is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in your driveway—unless you’re loaded and it’s kept safe, hidden from the outside world by gates or other security measures—and you have no reasonable expectation not to be tracked by the government.
