Brian D. Kelly is facing a felony wiretapping charge in Pennsylvania for running a video camera pointed at a police officer during a traffic stop.
This case would seem to indicate that Pennsylvania has a law that needs changing. The Rodney King beating is the best known of hundreds of cases of police misbehavior caught on tape.
According to the defense attorney cited in the story, “An exception to the wiretapping law allows police to film people during traffic stops.” This would seem to give law enforcement the right to capture and possibly edit their version of the truth while simultaneously criminalizing a citizen doing the same thing.
The District Attorney on the case noted that he had handled other video taping cases, “Some involving ex-lovers or divorcing couples who are trying to record former partners doing something improper for leverage in court battles.”
The DA’s use of the word “leverage” would seem to imply a hostility toward the truth as represented by a video.
Using the DA’s logic the video of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Representative John Murtha negotiating an apparent bribe with an Arab shiek is to be frowned on because of the “leverage” it offered opponents to congressional bribery.
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