The Illinois General Assembly just passed a bill that would prevent citizens from recording the police.
Earlier this year, the Illinois Supreme Court struck down a state eavesdropping law that made it a crime for citizens to record conversations with police or anyone else without the other person’s permission. The court held that the old law “criminalize[d] a wide range of innocent conduct” and violated free-speech rights. In particular, the court noted the state could not criminalize recording activities where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, including citizens’ “public” encounters with police.
Now the old law is back, with just a few changes, in a new bill sent to the governor’s desk by the Illinois Senate on Dec. 4. The bill not only passed, but did so overwhelmingly with votes of 106-7 in the House on and 46-4-1 in the Senate.
The new version is nearly as bad as the old one.
Under the new bill, a citizen could rarely be sure whether recording any given conversation without permission is legal. The bill would make it a felony to surreptitiously record any “private conversation,” which it defines as any “oral communication between 2 or more persons,” where at least one person involved had a “reasonable expectation” of privacy.
When does the person you’re talking to have a reasonable expectation of privacy? The bill doesn’t say. And that’s not something an ordinary person can be expected to figure out.
A law must be clear enough for citizens to know in advance whether a particular action is a crime. This bill doesn’t meet that standard, which should be reason enough for a court to strike it down if it becomes law.
But lack of clarity isn’t the only problem with this bill.
Although it appears to be designed to accommodate the Illinois Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the old law, the bill actually is designed to continue to prevent people from recording interactions with police.
The bill says it would only be a crime to record someone where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, which should mean that recording public encounters with police would not be a crime, and the old law’s fatal constitutional flaw would no longer exist.
But the bill doesn’t really fix the problem. Again, citizens can’t be expected to know for sure precisely which situations give rise to an “expectation of privacy” and which don’t. The Illinois Supreme Court said that police don’t have an expectation of privacy in “public” encounters…
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