Saturday, June 07, 2014
OK to photo Obama working out; more on downstream liability, police surveillance of drivers
Was it OK for people to film president Obama working
out in a gym in Poland while on a trip?
Was the president entitled to some privacy during such a more personal
setting?
In fact, many gyms don’t permit photography of
customers or employees under normal circumstances. But perhaps this one did allow it. If so, the president was in a public place,
and unless there was some unusual issue of intimacy, I think it was OK to film
him. And, because he is the leader of
the Free World, he is a public figure.
So what if it makes him look fallible when compared to Putin? I think that analogy was rather silly. It's OK to photograph Obama at Ben's Chili Bowl, isn't it? The Secret Service doesn't seem to mind.
There’s still another issue roaming around, whether
the site “CreepyPasta”, by facilitation of the telling of horror stories with
addictive characters (like “SlenderMan”) has some responsibility for the
behavior of vulnerable and unstable tweens, in fact two twelve year old girls
who chillingly premeditated the attack on their “friend”. I think the answer is probably no, but the
idea is surely coming up for debate. A
world that allows people to self-broadcast without gatekeepers (or with less
stringent gatekeepning) does put the vulnerable at risk. I talked about this on my COPA blog (June 3).
Today, CNN is covering an LAPD system that
automatically reads the license plates of every car any police officers passes,
and feeds the data into a system called Palantir, funded in part by the CIA and
NSA. The LAPD says that the system
solves burglaries, auto thefts, street crimes, and foils terror plots. How will this fit into the NSA surveillance
debate?
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