News Item:
Security cameras raise rights concerns in NY
The New York Civil Liberties Union [local version of the ACLU] is concerned about all the security cameras going up in New York City. Their claim is that the cameras have become so pervasive that they threaten rights of privacy, speech, and association. They also claim that the cameras have not shown to be a deterrant to crime in the city. So let’s take a look at that argument.
1 – Privacy: Common sense would tell you, that if you wanted to do something in private, you should first be in a private place. A public street is not a private place.
2 – Speech: I have yet to find a camera that stopped me from saying anything I wanted to. I’ve tried it. Saw a camera on a pole the other day, and went up and talked to it. Even called it nasty names. Nothing happened.
3 – Association: If you are associating with known criminals, people most likely will assume that you are a criminal too. The cops should know about that. If you’re associating with your mother-in-law, well, that’s your problem.
4 – Deterrant: Since the NYCLU didn’t cite any stats about crime in New York, I went and looked them up. The truth is, even though New York is putting fewer people in jail, crime in the city is down, way down. Which means the claim by the NYCLU is an out and out lie, period. Read the Washington Post article below.
The ACLU, and its branches, anymore, don’t seem to have a whole lot to do with real life. Their crusades to protect our rights are increasingly becoming non-issues, and about as effective as the UN preserving world peace.
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Full Story: Reuters
Crime Stats: Washington Post
Cartoon from Sid in the City
2 users commented in " Private acts in public places? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackYour are correct on the privacy issue, in addition, the ACLU knows that the standard the court uses in privacy cases is “does the person have a reasonable expectation of privacy in this situation/instance?” Public places are just that -PUBLIC , and the courts have ruled extensively on this in the past. That is why they are throwing up the airball instead of a challenge that has validity.
You are both quite wrong.
In Katz v United States the Supreme Court held that, “The Fourth Amendment protects people, not just places.”
In other words, Katz, despite using a public phone booth in public had a reasonable expectation of privacy and thus any recordings made of him in the booth required a warrant.
The massive growth of CCTV has vastly reduced the amount of privacy that people have in public spaces. It used to be that if no one was tailing you, you had a reasonable expectation that your movements were not being recorded. That’s no longer the case and its due to the actions of the government in installing CCTV systems willy-nilly.
It is as if the police who were recording Katz had just kept on doing it over and over again through the years, and so people finally just gave up and accepted it. That’s not the way public policy is supposed to be made.
PS – all your arguments about not personally being affected are infantile – how many people are personally affected by the oppression in China? How about the former USSR? Most people get up, go to work, come home, go to sleep and just generally live their lives regardless of what legal system they live in.
Its only a very small minority that are personally and directly affected by bad laws. But the ripple effects can be enormous – look at Spitzer, a force for law and order taken down by an outright privacy violation and now any future affect he might have had on public policy will never happen. You’d be a fool to think that happened by pure chance – he pissed off the wrong people and they abused the system to take him out and we will all suffer for it.
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