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Tag: Recording

  • Trayvon Martin’s Mother: Screams Were My Son’s

    Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, has testified in court in the case against George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is accused of the February 26, 2012 shooting of Martin after having called 911 to report a suspicious figure in his gated community (Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain, had made similar calls several times over the previous six months).

    When asked by Prosecutor Bernie de la Rionda whether she had any children, Fulton replied, “My youngest son is Trayvon Benjamin Martin. He’s in heaven.”

    After describing her son’s tattoos—one of which had the names of his grandmother and great-grandmother, the other Fulton’s name—De la Rionda played an audio recording of a 911 call placed by a neighbor who witnessed Zimmerman and Martin’s struggle. The recording featured screams that Fulton testified to be her son’s, followed by a gunshot.

    On cross-examination, defense attorney Mark O’Mara suggested that Fulton wanted the screams to be those of her son rather than Zimmerman, a claim Fulton rejected.

    Martin’s brother, Jaharvis Fulton, also took the stand, claiming that the voice was Trayvon’s. This testimony forced Jaharvis to recant a previous report that he wasn’t sure whose voice it was. “How do I explain?” he said, “I guess I didn’t want to believe it was him. . . . I guess listening to it was clouded by shock and denial and sadness.”

    Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, had previously told authorities that the voice in the recording was not Trayvon’s.

    An FBI audio expert testified that technology couldn’t definitively clarify whose voice it was, but a close relative may be able to tell. Even so, he warned, bias on the part of the listener could influence what that individual heard.

    Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder. The case has aroused racial tensions nationwide, as Martin was African-American and Zimmerman’s willingness to pursue Martin has been suggested to have been racially motivated. The Martin incident was the fifth time in seven months that Zimmerman had called 911 to report a suspicious person in his community. In all five instances, the person Zimmerman identified as suspcious was an African-American male.

    If convicted, Zimmerman could face 25 years to life in prison.

  • It’s Your First Amendment Right to Record Cops [Supreme Court]

    In a victory for the ACLU and First Amendment activists everywhere, the United States Supreme Court has denied a request to review a decision that blocks the enforcement of an Illinois law barring the public from recording police officers.

    Back in 2010, the ACLU filed suit against a specific application of the Illinois Eavesdropping Act that made the audio recording or police officers a crime, punishable by a 15-year prison sentence. The lawsuit was initially rejected by the U.S. District Court who claimed that there was no First Amendement right to record on-duty police officers in public. But a May 2012 ruling by an appellate court reversed that ruling, allowing for an injunction blocking enforcement of the law.

    “Even under the more lenient intermediate standard of scrutiny applicable to contentneutral burdens on speech, this application of the statute very likely flunks. The Illinois eavesdropping statute restricts far more speech than necessary to protect legitimate privacy interests; as applied to the facts alleged here, it likely violates the First Amendment’s free speech and free-press guarantees,” said the appellate court in the ruling.

    But the Cook County State’s Attorney wanted the Supreme Court to review that decision. Today, the Supreme Court has officially denied that request.

    Here’s the statement from the ACLU, who clearly believes that a rebuke of the Illinois law could have far-reaching effects for similar laws throughout the United States:

    We are pleased that the Supreme Court has refused to take this appeal. Now, we can focus on the on-going proceedings in the federal district court. We now hope to obtain a permanent injunction in this case, so that the ACLU’s program of monitoring police activity in public can move forward in the future without any threat of prosecution. The ACLU of Illinois continues to believe that in order to make the rights of free expression and petition effective, individuals and organizations must be able to freely gather and record information about the conduct of government and their agents – especially the police. The advent and widespread accessibility of new technologies make the recording and dissemination of pictures and sound inexpensive, efficient and easy to accomplish.

    While a final ruling in this case will only address the work of the ACLU of Illinois to monitor police activity, we believe that it will have a ripple effect throughout the entire state. We are hopeful that we are moving closer to a day when no one in Illinois will risk prosecution when they audio record public officials performing their duties. Empowering individuals and organizations in this fashion will ensure additional transparency and oversight of public officials across the State.

    The Illinois law, while on the books, had been notoriously hard to draw a conviction from. Back in 2011, a jury acquitted a woman who had been charged with recording Chicago police.

  • Videotaping Police is Easier With the New ACLU Police Tape App

    The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) declared victory back in May, when a Federal Appeals Court ruled that Illinois’ eavesdropping statute does not apply to police performing their duties in public. This week, the ACLU of New Jersey announced it is releasing a new Police Tape app for smartphones. The app will allow users to discreetly record police officers and function as a resource for information on citizen rights. The app was developed for the ACLU-NJ by OpenWatch, a citizen media project that develops software for monitoring authority figures.

    “This app provides an essential tool for police accountability,” said Deborah Jacobs, ACLU-NJ executive director. “Too often incidents of serious misconduct go unreported because citizens don’t feel that they will be believed. Here, the technology empowers citizens to place a check on police power directly.”

    The Police Tape app disappears from the screen as soon as it begins recording either video or audio, making it difficult to determine that any type of recording is taking place. In addition, judging by the comments left in the Google Play store, the app makes it difficult to find and delete its recordings from the device it is used on. Users can also set the app to upload recordings to the ACLU-NJ for backup and “analysis of possible civil liberties violations.” The Know Your Rights section of the app gives some brief tips on what citizen rights are when interacting with police in various settings, such as a car or on the street.

    If the ACLU-NJ is sincere about checking all of the files uploaded, I suspect that they will discover, the way Apple has, that people enjoy sending pictures of genitalia in for review. That might be especially true given the ACLU’s reputation in some parts of the U.S., not to mention the bold confrontation and questioning of authority that the Police Tape app represents.

    The Police Tape app is now available for free through the Google Play store. An iOS version of the app is awaiting Apple’s approval and is expected by the ACLU-NJ to be available later this summer.

    Take a look at the video the ACLU-NJ has created to demonstrate the functionality of the app below:

  • YouTube Users File Petition To Allow For The Use Of Third-Party Recording Tools

    Should YouTube users be allowed to rip the content they like to their hard drive, much like a person would use a DVR to record a television show of interest? Some users believe they should have such capabilities, and so, they’ve started a petition essentially asking for DVR rights when using YouTube.

    The petition comes on the heels of the announcement that Google is going after the video-to-mp3 conversion site with the obvious title, YouTube-MP3.com, something that’s reflected in the petition’s introduction:

    For decades people were allowed to take a private copy of a public broadcast. You could record the radio program with a cassette recorder or make a copy of your favorite movie by using a video recorder. All these techniques have been opposed heavily in its early years by the big media companies who didn’t want the public to have such technology. They did describe such technology as criminal and as a threat to their business.

    Several years later history is about to repeat: Google has teamed up with the RIAA to make the same claims against all sorts of online recording tools for their 21th century broadcasting service: YouTube (“Broadcast yourself”). Google is taking action against nearly every service that enables its users to create a private copy of a public YouTube broadcast while the RIAA is threatening news media like CNet for promoting such a software.

    I hereby ask Google to break their silence and participate in an open and fair discussion with the intention to find a solution that suits the needs of the users.

    It should be noted that while consumers could tape music from the radio or make duplicates of other tapes with a dual-cassette setup, it wasn’t necessarily smiled upon by the powers that were. In fact, the MPAA went all out against the technology that was videocassette recorders (VCRs). The difference being, media consumption in the 80s was very much a one-way process, with the consumer having little recourse regarding feedback. Sure, an occasional letter might have made capitalism work in your favor, but there certainly weren’t multiple avenues of communication like those offered by Facebook and Twitter.

    With that in mind, should users be able to make copies of YouTube content, be it in the form of third part video recording software or through sites that rip the video’s soundtrack out, converting it to an MP3? While the comparison between DVRs and Internet broadcasts are based in logic, it’s impossible to see the current powers that be siding with the user here, especially when you consider the massive fuss these content providers have made about YouTube in the past. Perhaps a balance could be struck allowing users who upload their own self-created content to give their viewers the option of downloading the file.

    Other than that, it’s hard to see a day that the RIAA says “sure, you can download any of the music you like from YouTube’s VEVO service, unless the song was purchased by the viewer first. As pointed out by GigaOm, the petition has over 180,000 signatures since it was put up three days prior. While the support is admirable, it’s hard to see this working out in their favor.