Actually, most state constitutions protect recording in public places. The free speech clauses allow making, transmitting, and publishing anything you want, an

Actually, most state constitutions protect recording in public places. The free speech clauses allow making, transmitting, and publishing anything you want, and an audio recording is simply a publication of one record to yourself. To put it another way, if an audio recording can be prohibited, then the same law could also provide for summary execution for taking pencil and paper notes, which is a patent civil rights violation. This is a matter of established black letter law, with precedents out the wazoo. The classical wiretap laws are based on a theory of trespass. It is trespass and vandalism to plant a bug in someone's office. Recordings from the bug are not a violation of some nebulous (and expandable) right to privacy, but rather the ill-gotten gains of a crime. And what are the cops thinking, anyway? When you place yourself outside the protections of the law, you are outside the protections of the law. If I get beaten and robbed with impunity, and locked up for 20 years if I try to protect myself, I'll simply kill every cop that so much as looks at me wrong.