I’ve noted before that just as the government is ramping up efforts to videotape every facet of public life, the government itself refuses to be videotaped. The cops who busted the Utah rave, for example, roughed up and detained anyone who attempted to tape the event, and took away their cameras (to turn a common argument on its ear — if they weren’t doing anything wrong, what were they afraid of?). When a guy in Virginia attempted to videotape cops busting up a house party last month, he too was beaten and arrested, and his camera was broken and confiscated. Police unions are dead-set against camera-monitoring of cops on the job.

Latest incident: Over at Boing-Boing, Cory Doctrow tells the story of a couple of guys who were detained and searched for the simple offense of “carrying a camera.”

On the plus side, a judge just awarded a man $41,000 after he was arrested for videotaping state troopers.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 1:44 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.