It’s Now Illegal In Illinois To Film Cops

An amendment to a Senate bill in Illinois has been overwhelmingly passed to ensure that recording police officers and government officials is now a felony.

The Amendment to Senate Bill 1342 was stealthily introduced on the back of an unrelated piece of legislation last week. It essentially reestablishes a completely unconstitutional eavesdropping law that was previously overturned by The Supreme Court in March for being too draconian.

The amendment has stripped away safeguards to free speech rights from the original legislation and instituted a blanket ban on recording officials in public. It was passed by both the Illinois House and the Senate, with huge majorities, within two days of it’s introduction.

A post at watchdog website IllinoisPolicy.org notes that the bill is designed to prevent people from documenting interactions with cops on their cell phones by making it a class 3 felony to “eavesdrop” on city and state officials including police officers, police, an attorney general, an assistant attorney general, a state’s attorney, an assistant state’s attorney or a judge.

The new amendment legislates it way around the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ standard in law by refraining from defining it, and merely states that recording any “oral communication between 2 or more persons” is now illegal.

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