Charles, I understand what you're saying, but if you think the police are just an impersonal physical manifestation of the law, and don't ever act in a way that overreaches what the law was designed for, i think you are wrong. Police themselves (who are, as a community, a very political group - with a small p), their superiors and the lawmakers all have personal attitudes which influence how eager they are to pursue certain people or police and prosecute certain activities. the same law can be exploited more or less aggressively by people with different agendas.
I only say this here because I'm worried about people with cameras. I see attitudes among police and lawmakers in the west that make me nervous. i was stopped 2 weeks ago by a policeman who told me to stop filming a roadblock at the end of my road on my phone 'because of terrorism'. this under the watchful eye of 3 lamppost-mounted council/police CCTV cameras. The UK is the most CCTVd nation in the world, with between 5 and 10 million cameras. each of us is filmed several hundred times a day, and now they are fitting the cameras with face recognition software and loudspeakers so that they can bark orders at us from the sky. yet we, the public, have to be more and more careful and surreptitious if we want to use a camera in public. in france, it's apparently illegal to film an act of violence now unless you are an accredited journalist (the authorities protecting themselves from rodney king style exposés). in america, they locked a videoblogger up for a year because he refused to give them his tape. which said more about their politics than about his, in my opinion. people are careless about their civil liberties, the authorities are pushing their envelope of control, and those of us with cameras are going to start seeing the effect of that more and more unless we can raise public consciousness in a sensible way. Rupert http://www.twitter.com/ruperthowe/ http://twittervlog.blogspot.com/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/twittervlog/ On 10 Apr 2007, at 06:38, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote: Hello, The law is a means to an end. Not a holy document. If it's not illegal now... that can be "fixed" and made illegal very easily. Saying things like they are "backwards" or "corrupt" implies that they are NOT doing what they are suppose to be doing. Even in this case, the police are doing what their suppose to do. (The question that that statement begs is... WHO determines what they are suppose to be doing.) See ya On 4/9/07, JOHNNIE WARNER <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > ..something I felt like sharing - kinda made me wanna say hmmmm..... > > Its been plenty of times that have been shared over the web when > people are mistreated or mishandled by the cops or other forms of > authority. This youtube clip in particular just shows how backwards > and corrupt some of OUR law enforcement agencies are and where their > real priorities are. Although this may be comical in it s > deliverance of the prank - i don't think it deserved the end result. > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7snbtwG5wc&mode=related&search= > > http://www.oneinthehand.blogspot.com > The only Treo Training Video Cast in the World -- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. charles @ reptile.ca supercanadian @ gmail.com developer weblog: http://ChangeLog.ca/ __________________________________________________________ Make Television http://maketelevision.com/ __________________________________________________________ Cars, Motorcycles, Trucks, and Racing... http://tirebiterz.com/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
