The bill is written around a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in March that struck down an eavesdropping law that would made it a felony to record audio of police officers working in public. The court had ruled that the state could not make it illegal to record conversations where there was no “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and said it would “criminalize a wide range of innocent conduct” and violate free-speech rights.
However, the new law does not make a clear distinction between what situations qualify as a private encounter, the Illinois Policy Institute says. The private think tank says that it is “aimed at promoting personal freedom and prosperity,” and that the unclear nature of the bill’s wording make it open to wide interpretation.
“The Illinois Supreme Court said that police don’t have an expectation of privacy in ‘public’ encounters with citizens, but it did not explain what counts as a ‘public’ encounter,” the institute said in a blog post.
The bill is designed to scare citizens from recording police interactions, the institute claims, thanks to steeper punishments for recording the private conversations of on-duty police and court officers than private citizens.
It makes “unlawfully recording a conversation with police – or an attorney general, assistant attorney general, state’s attorney, assistant state’s attorney or judge – a class 3 felony, carrying a sentence of two to four years in prison.” Meanwhile, the proposed law would make recording private citizens a class 4 felony, “which carries a lower sentencing range of one to three years in prison.”
The bill must be signed by the governor before it becomes law. The institute claims that the proposed law could also be used as an argument against police body cameras, since it could be argued that recordings outside of “public” places would be illegal, since people in private homes and other areas have not consented to the recording.
http://www.ibtimes.com/illinois-passes-bill-makes-it-illegal-record-police-1744724
Soooo ya can hack into our phones and hear our conversations but when we record for our own saftey you pass a law.
THIS IS IMPORTANT.
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Spencer Witcraft 