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A woman at a gym tells her friend she pays rent higher than $2,000 a month. An ex-Microsoft employee describes his work as an artist to a woman he's interviewing to be his assistant—he makes paintings and body casts, as well as something to do with infrared light that's hard to discern from his foreign accent. Another man describes his gay lover's unusual sexual fetish, which involves engaging in fake fistfights, "like we were doing a scene from Batman Returns."
These conversations—apparently real ones, whose participants had no knowledge an eavesdropper might be listening—were recorded and published by the NSA. Well, actually no, not the NSA, but an anonymous group of anti-NSA protestors claiming to be contractors of the intelligence agency and launching a new "pilot program" in New York City on its behalf. That spoof of a pilot program, as the prankster provocateurs describe and document it in videos on their website, involves planting micro-cassette recorders under tables and benches around New York city, retrieving the tapes and embedding the resulting audio on their website: Wearealwayslistening.com.
Could actions like these, while they will surely be dismissed as childish stunts by some, succeed at driving home the real impact of NSA spying to the general public in a way that hasn't been managed yet?
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:03PM
There is no expectation of privacy in a public space.
Perhaps not, but there are laws across the nation against making secret recordings. New York's state laws are better than some (a handful of states insist that everyone recorded must consent), but unless at least one person in the recording must be aware of it for the recording to be legal in the state of New York.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:18PM
Are you sure the context is the same? That is frequently the case for phone conversations, but those are not public like two people walking down the street and conversing. If NY does have such a law, it would make video recordings of the police extremely problematic.
(Score: 2) by Zinho on Thursday May 21 2015, @03:54PM
#include stdDisclaimer.IANAL
I agree with you that the context is very different; however, in practice the wiretap laws have been extended far beyond recording of phone conversations and are applied to any voice recording regardless of context. A quick bit of searching turned up an interesting article from the American Bar Association which asserts that secret recording of police is a bad idea, [americanbar.org] even though openly recording them is widely recognized as a 1st Amendment right and protected by the courts.
In general I expect that these days State prosecutors would apply the wiretapping statues to any covert audio recording of a conversation. As such, since the Federal laws state that at least one participant be aware of the recording, these dead-drop style recorders would be illegal because none of the people being recorded were aware of the recording. As I stated before, New York State law also requires at least one party be aware, so the Feds and the State could duke it out for jurisdiction if they wanted to.
Other fun links I found in a quick search:
How it works in a 2-party or all-party state like California [dailybreeze.com]
The Congressional Research Service's position on legality and ethicality of secret recordings in the various states [fas.org]
And, a final trivia note: recording video without audio bypasses the wiretapping laws entirely, which is why most surveillance systems record video only.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin