Though by no means a comprehensive overview, here some basic rules of the road for catching police activity in your viewfinder.

Do you have the right to photograph police officers in public?

Yes. Taking pictures (still images, not video) of things that are visible in public spaces is a constitutional right guaranteed by the First Amendment. This includes photographing police officers and other law enforcement officials in public.

Can you take pictures while police officers are making an arrest or during civil unrest, such as a protest or riot?

It is completely within your rights to photograph police officers conducting their duties at an incident scene, including while making arrests. Police officers may legally ask you to stop only if your activities are impeding law enforcement activities.

Though the law is clear and courts have consistently upheld these rights, in numerous cases individuals have been illegally harassed, detained, or arrested for taking pictures of police officers (as well as other legally permissible subjects, such as transportation facilities and outside of federal buildings). Multimedia journalist Carlos Miller has documented many of these cases on his blog, Photography is Not a Crime.

Are there any public places where you can be arrested for taking photos of police? What about the airport?

Though officers may cite security or terrorist threats when confronted by a camera, only a few general exceptions to the rule really exist. For example, if you take images of specific areas at military installations, those images could pose a threat to national security and can legally be prohibited, according to Bert P. Krages II, an attorney and author of Legal Handbook for Photographers.

“Most attempts at restricting photography are done by lower-level security and law enforcement officials acting way beyond their authority. Note that neither the Patriot Act nor the Homeland Security Act have any provisions that restrict photography,” says Krages.

Photography is indeed legal at the airport, including at screening locations, despite reports of travelers being questioned or harassed for taking photos or video.

The Transportation Security Administration allows you to take pictures at checkpoints “as long as you’re not interfering with the screening process or slowing things down.” They also ask not to take pictures or video of the monitors, though the ACLU writes that “it is not clear whether they have any legal basis for such a restriction when the monitors are plainly viewable by the traveling public.”

Do rules for video differ from those for photography?

In general, yes. The visual portion of a video is fully protected under the First Amendment, and the same laws regarding photography apply. Things get murkier when it comes to the audio; the issue is currently being played out in hotly contested cases around the country. In several states people have been charged under wiretapping statutes for recording police officers without their consent.

Wiretapping or eavesdropping laws are designed to protect private conversations from being secretly recorded. In the majority of states, only one person must consent to the recording for it to be legal. In the twelve states where both parties must provide consent, some prosecutors have argued that filming a police officer without permission violates his or her rights, even if it occurs in a public place where there is no “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The number of such cases has jumped in recent years, but in August the ACLU scored a major victory, in the First Circuit Court of Appeals, that will likely have significant implications for such suits around the country. On October 1, 2007, attorney Simon Glik whipped out his cell phone to record police officers making an arrest in Massachusetts. After an officer asked whether his film included audio, he was arrested for violating the state’s wiretap statute. In a unanimous ruling, the court ruled that Glik (backed by the ACLU) had a right to videotape the police carrying out their duties in public, and his arrest was therefore unconstitutional.

While other states have brought similar cases under old wiretapping laws, Illinois amended the law to make it explicitly illegal to record police officers on duty without their consent. The constitutionality of that law is currently being challenged in a federal court, in ACLU v. Alvarez.

Can a police officer confiscate your equipment or demand to see photographs/video that you have taken?

In certain circumstances. In general, unless the camera was used in a crime (such as child pornography or “upskirting”), police officers need a warrant to seize your equipment or to view pictures or video.

However, courts may approve the seizure of a camera in some instances where police have “reasonable, good-faith belief that it contains evidence of a crime by someone other than the police themselves (it is unsettled whether they still need a warrant to view them),” according to the ACLU.

Can police officers delete your photographs or video?

No. Though news reports indicate a disturbing trend of cops illegally deleting evidence, police officers may never erase your photographs or video.

What should you do if an officer stops you from taking pictures or shooting footage?

Just because you are within your rights, it doesn’t mean you won’t be questioned or harassed for shooting pictures or video of police officers.

In the event of a confrontation, stay calm and respectful. Don’t give the officer an opportunity to arrest you on unrelated charges such as obstruction of justice.

The ACLU, in its newly released guide “Know Your Rights: Photographers,” recommends asking the officer if you are free to leave. “If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. “ (Read more)

I wish this was an April Fool’s Day joke.

The following collection of 25 flyers produced by the FBI and the Department of Justice are distributed to local businesses in a variety of industries to promote suspicious activity reporting. The flyers are not released publicly, though several have been published in the past by news media and various law enforcement agencies around the country. We have compiled this collection from a number of online sources. . . .

Threat Areas

Airport Service Providers
Beauty/Drug Suppliers
Bulk Fuel Distributors
Construction Sites
Dive/Boat Shops
Electronics Stores
Farm Supply Stores
Financial Institutions
General Aviation
General Public
Hobby Shops
Home Improvement
Hotels/Motels
Internet Cafes
Shopping Malls
Martial Arts/Paintball

. . . .
(Read more)

Below are some excerpts from a great essay by Chris Hedges. The only thing I disagree with is his surprise that the state chooses to increase its authority.

I’m no longer surprised when government courts rule that the government is right, and we underlings are wrong. This is Hoppe’s argument for what he calls “a private law society” (what others call anarcho-captialism). A monopoly on justice will always rule in its own favor.

Historian and author Tom Woods makes a strong case for nullification being a better protector of the Constitution than the panel of providentially appointed judges.

The government also gets to unilaterally decide how much to charge you for this “service” and kidnaps you if you refuse to pay, labelling you a “tax evader.”

Totalitarian systems disempower an unsuspecting population by gradually making legal what was once illegal. They incrementally corrupt and distort law to exclusively serve the goals of the inner sanctums of power and strip protection from the citizen. Law soon becomes the primary tool to advance the crimes of the elite and punish those who tell the truth. The state saturates the airwaves with official propaganda to replace news. Fear, and finally terror, creates an intellectual and moral void. . . .

And a conviction of Bradley Manning, or any of the five others charged by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act of 1917 with passing on government secrets to the press, would effectively terminate public knowledge of the internal workings of the corporate state. What we live under cannot be called democracy. What we will live under if the Supreme Court upholds the use of the Espionage Act to punish those who expose war crimes and state lies will be a species of corporate fascism. And this closed society is, perhaps, only a few weeks or months away.

Few other Americans are as acutely aware of our descent into corporate totalitarianism as Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971 to The New York Times and is one of Manning’s most ardent and vocal defenders.

. . . .

The Supreme Court has yet to hear a case involving the Espionage Act. But one of these six cases will probably soon reach the court. If it, as expected, rules that the government is permitted to use the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, the United States will have a de facto official secrets act. A ruling in favor of the government would instantly criminalize all disclosures of classified information to the public. It would shut down one of the most important functions of the press. And at that point any challenges to the official versions of events would dry up.

The Obama administration, to make matters worse, has mounted a war not only against those who leak information but those who publish it, including Assange. The Obama administration is attempting to force New York Times reporter James Risen to name the source, or sources, that told him about a failed effort by the Central Intelligence Agency to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program. Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer, is charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking information about the program to Risen. If Risen confirms in court that Sterling was his source, Sterling probably will be convicted. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Espionage Act would also remove the legal protection that traditionally allows journalists to refuse to reveal their sources. (Read more)

Expect more of this:

Tax dollars at work:

The FDA has won its two-year fight to shut down an Amish farmer who was selling fresh, raw milk to eager consumers in the Washington region, after a judge this month banned Daniel Allgyer from selling his milk across state lines, and he told his customers he’ll shut his farm down altogether.

The decision has enraged Mr. Allgyer’s supporters, some of whom have been buying from him for six years and who say the government is interfering with their parental rights to feed their children. But the Food and Drug Administration, which launched a full investigation complete with a 5 a.m. surprise inspection and a straw-purchase sting operation against Mr. Allgyer’s Rainbow Acres Farm, near Lancaster, said unpasteurized milk is unsafe and said it was exercising its due authority to stop its sale from one state to another. (Read more)

They may just be the hardest drugs on the market, if the FDA are to be believed.

A company which sells walnuts has been told they are dealing in drugs because their packaging suggests health benefits which the Food and Drug Administration has not approved, it has been reported.

A fiercely-worded letter from the agency allegedly insisted Diamond Foods, from Stockton, California, remove the health claims or send off for a new drug application if it did not wish to be closed down.

The nut company has been selling its products with packaging which states the omega-3 fatty acids in walnuts have been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease and some types of cancer.

But while the claims are backed up by research, including 35 published medical papers supporting assertions that eating walnuts improves vascular health and may reduce risk of heart attacks, the FDA is said to have insisted the company is ‘misbranding’ its foods because the ‘product bears health claims that are not authorised by the FDA’. (Read more)

This is from way back in 2000, but it remains relevant. It speaks to the larger point that government are crappy providers of security. They inevitably value obedience over the safety of their population.

See my essay on the state monopoly of violence here.

A man whose bid to become a police officer was rejected after he scored too high on an intelligence test has lost an appeal in his federal lawsuit against the city.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court’s decision that the city did not discriminate against Robert Jordan because the same standards were applied to everyone who took the test. (Read more)

Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.

These extremists, sometimes known as “sovereign citizens,” believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI agents said at a news conference.

The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went bankrupt by going off the gold standard. (Read more)

Expect more of this. Dissent cannot be tolerated for long. Dissenters must be demonized.

The general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable. The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward collectivism offers an opportunity to reexamine the existing activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of the activities that are and those that are not justified. This paper attempts such a re-examination for education.
Education is today largely paid for and almost entirely administered by governmental bodies or non-profit institutions. This situation has developed gradually and is now taken so much for granted that little explicit attention is any longer directed to the reasons for the special treatment of education even in countries that are predominantly free enterprise in organization and philosophy. The result has been an indiscriminate extension of governmental responsibility. . . . .
(Read more)

Translation: Everybody must obey.

The world can no longer afford to ignore the environmental cost of economic growth and must redefine the very concept of national wealth, a UN panel of heads of state and environment ministers said Monday.

The panel challenged leaders to recognise that “current global development is unsustainable.”

“We need to chart a new, more sustainable course for the future, one that strengthens equality and economic growth while protecting our planet,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said in Addis Ababa to mark the release of the panel’s report, which outlines more than 50 policy recommendations. (Read more)