YOUTUBE SURVIVOR SERIES #99: DEATH OF A DISCO DANCER

Not the Smiths song, but Bobby Farrell of Boney M., who died last week.

Which I mention for three reasons:

1. I have a soft spot for Boney M, who can rightly claim to be West Germany’s greatest contribution to disco (by way of the Caribbean islands, where most of the actual singers came from, Farrell included).

2. Farrell was a former male exotic dancer before joining Boney M. Which served him well, if you ask me.

3. Farrell died on December 29 – the anniversary of the death of Grigori Rasputin, who is not only my default LJ icon, but was also the subject of one of Boney M’s biggest hit songs.

Even better, Farrell and Rasputin both died in St Petersburg.

So I pretty much have to post this, don’t I?

Russia’s greatest love machine,

This is dF

RECORD A COP, GO TO JAIL

ITEM: Radney Balko of Reason.com writes a long but worthwhile article on the War On Cameras – i.e. the growing trend of people using cameraphones to videotape encounters with law enforcement officials – and being arrested for it.

Put another way, if you think you’ve been unfairly stopped by a police officer – or if you see one, say, beating someone up – and you pull out yr iPhone to tape it, either as evidence or as a back-up in case yr version of events conflicts with the officer’s, the act of recording can get you arrested and convicted.

As citizens increase their scrutiny of law enforcement officials through technologies such as cell phones, miniature cameras, and devices that wirelessly connect to video-sharing sites such as YouTube and LiveLeak, the cops are increasingly fighting back with force and even jail time—and not just in Illinois. Police across the country are using decades-old wiretapping statutes that did not anticipate iPhones or Droids, combined with broadly written laws against obstructing or interfering with law enforcement, to arrest people who point microphones or video cameras at them. Even in the wake of gross injustices, state legislatures have largely neglected the issue.

Bruce Schneier explains why this is important, and why the police are wrong:

Being able to record the police is one of the best ways to ensure that the police are held accountable for their actions. Privacy has to be viewed in the context of relative power. For example, the government has a lot more power than the people. So privacy for the government increases their power and increases the power imbalance between government and the people; it decreases liberty. Forced openness in government -- open government laws, Freedom of Information Act filings, the recording of police officers and other government officials, WikiLeaks -- reduces the power imbalance between government and the people, and increases liberty. [...]

I think we need a law that explicitly makes it legal for people to record government officials when they are interacting with them in their official capacity. And this is doubly true for police officers and other law enforcement officials.

Know yr rights,

This is dF