I was alerted from Ed Brayton about a nasty bit of work going on with the Boston PD. All the details are here.
Here’s the story: So there’s a video out there of some police intimidation against someone videoing them. The site photography is not a crime had it up on their site some time back. Since then a journalist contacted the public information officer for comment, which naturally resulted in that person being charged with wiretapping. So the site published the officer’s contact information so that people could contact them in hopes of getting them to drop the charges. So now they want to charge the owner of the site with witness intimidation and they’re threatening to charge the callers.
As Ed said on his site:
Yes, they’re charging a journalist with a felony for recording a conversation with a public information officer (which, by the way, they should be strongly in favor of him doing so their statements are portrayed accurately). Seriously.
and..
So let me get this straight. They’re charging him with felony witness intimidation for encouraging the public to contact a public information officer to protest police intimidation of a journalist over his “crime” of reporting to the public what was said by a public information officer.
Wonderful.
Did the site actually publish the raw info, or merely point to where the BPD had, you know, already published the contact info for the… ah… public information officer?
I feel the only satisfactory ending for this nightmare (that doesn’t involve a zombie Orwell, that is…) is for the entire BPD to end up in a courtroom arguing with itself over the finer distinctions between, and relative merits of, solipsism, existential despair and moral blindness
…. and the penalties and costs are real.