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Illinois prosecutors have charged a 13-year-old student with felony eavesdropping for recording his conversation with two school administrators. Should he be found guilty and sentenced, a conviction could land him a minimum of one year in prison. According to TechDirt:
The [Illinois] law forbids recordings without all parties' consent. It would seem that the school officials' refusal to discuss anything further once they were informed they were being recorded should have been enough. The conversation was ended, along with the recording. If they were concerned they said something they shouldn't have during the previous ten minutes, maybe should have restrained themselves during the argument, rather than ruin a 13-year-old's life with a bad law Illinois legislators refuse to rewrite. Given how often this law is used to protect the powerful, it's hardly surprising legislators haven't expressed a serious interest in fixing it.
Everyone from the administrators to the prosecutors and those in between had a lot of discretion available to stop the chain of events, but all chose not to stop it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 03 2018, @01:00AM (1 child)
The issue is that it's not being consented to. The problem with 1 party consent for these sorts of things is that you don't know about the various tapes you're on and it's only if you yourself say something that you shouldn't that you learn about those tapes. If they say something incriminating, they're not likely to advertise the fact that they have tapes of themselves incriminating themselves.
It's not ideal, but it is at least some protection even though disclosure of such tapes to law enforcement would probably not result in charges for the person recording the conversation otherwise.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday July 03 2018, @03:10PM
One-party consent is so much fun though, because it enables all these incidents where some Republican politician thinks no one is listening and then he accidenally outs himself as a big douchebag.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"