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Judge rules Utah law banning undercover farm filming is unconstitutional
- microtherion 9y agoSo, combined with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14723415 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14723415 that makes TWO rulings today affirming the right to record pigs…
- marcoperaza 9y agoThat's a disgusting thing to say. Before calling police officers pigs, consider that they're the ones who show up to fight for your life when you need them. There's definitely ways to improve policing in America, but the vast majority of them are honorable people doing a dangerous job and serving their countrymen.
- RodericDay 9y agoYou're a Trump supporter, and defend decisions such as his travel ban, and call people proposing a higher minimum wage "unhinged". I'm surprised that you're appalled by someone making a crass generalization. Maybe you only notice these kinds of vulgar pronunciations when they target things that are popular with right wingers?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sctb 9y agoThis kind of incendiary personal attack is just about the last thing we need here. Please don't do this again.
- RodericDay 9y agoSo his shallow tonal dismissal is fair game, but an identificarion of a pattern which undermines it is unlawful ad-hominem? Seems like cargo cult moderation to me.
- marcoperaza 9y agoI was very bothered that you totally misrepresented my comment about the minimum wage. I never called anyone unhinged. I called the proposal unhinged from reality, because it doesn't take into account the economic reality of rural and small town America. There's a big difference between attacking an idea and attacking the people proposing it. Not to mention that that the word "unhinged" itself has a very different meaning when calling a proposal "unhinged from reality" than when calling a person "unhinged".
- bitJericho 9y agoDon't count on anybody in the us coming to your rescue when you need them. People working in the us government only work for themselves.
- mondoshawan 9y agoExcept your fellow humans. We're not all bad.
- undersuit 9y agoHuamns, of which Cops and all law enforcement are part of.
- bitJericho 9y agoIt takes a special kind of asshole that wants to be a cop.
- microtherion 9y agoI agree that the police are doing a difficult job (NOT a particularly dangerous one, however: http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/data/the-most-dangerous-jobs-in-the-us/collection_3ef04346-08ab-57b4-930a-08c90c750294.html http://rapidcityjournal.com/news/data/the-most-dangerous-job...) and they deserve and get my respect when they are doing it properly and let themselves be held accountable. However, there's a strong movement in the US to undermine accountability. Preventing citizens from recording the police, lying on behalf of colleagues, refusal to hold the police legally accountable in court, and the manufactured outrage whenever somebody says something critical about the police are all part of it. Ultimately, accountability is what separates the police as citizens in uniform (who deserve and get my respect) from a taxpayer funded gang (who deserve no respect). And if you think "taxpayer funded gang" is "disgusting" and "hyperbole", read this article and then tell me what's described is NOT gang activity: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-officer-indicted-20170706-story.html http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-ci-off...
- yardie 9y agoThere is no honor in propping up corrupt departments and officers. The majority of police officers do. They are concomitant to maintaining the status quo.
- wcummings 9y agoMaybe they show up and fight for your life but that's not a universal experience. Some people and communities rationally fear and dislike police officers.
- burntrelish1273 9y agoAg-gag laws are legitimized, crooked censorship. The meat processing industry is still extremely insulated, but let's hope this gets chipped away to reveal their secrets. This is one of the reasons undocumented immigrant labor is exploited: they generally won't say anything. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/us/meatpackers-profits-hinge-on-pool-of-immigrant-labor.html http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/us/meatpackers-profits-hin... http://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/news_home/Business/2013/04/Journalist_goes_undercover_at.aspx?ID=%7BD8E5B081-04D6-4254-880C-7166E0587A61%7D&cck=1 http://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/news_home/Business/2013/... See also: SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness (SHARK) to see what happens to those whom film use drones to legally film live caged animal shoots and other embarrassing/horrible human-animal interactions. http://sharkonline.org/ http://sharkonline.org/
- spraak 9y agoThanks for sharing, SHARK is amazing
- rayiner 9y ago> The meat processing industry is still extremely insulated, but let's hope this gets chipped away to reveal their secrets. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
- manicdee 9y agoThere are few people outside the health care system who will not be traumatised by watching a surgery. There are few people outside abbatoirs (or indeed inside them) who can watch animals being slaughtered and butchered without emotional trauma. Sometimes things are hidden from us to protect us from harm.
- ch4s3 9y agoThe meat industry isn't a person, it's an industry. It shouldn't be able to hide practices that endanger human health and safety. This isn't a privacy issue, this is about protecting the ability of whistleblowers to speak out.
- divbit_m 9y agoWhy not just put cameras in farm equipment and tell everyone straight up they are being filmed? No need for creeping around
- lighthazard 9y agoCan anyone explain the justification for not recording? I can only see positive things come out of it.
- arthur_trudeau 9y agoWould you want someone secretly taking video of the most embarrassing, context-free 5 minutes they could find of your job, and invoking a mob to attack you on that basis? These environments, or disrupting their operations because you're trying to get a sweet shot, can be legitimately dangerous. Discouraging people from trespassing in search of publicity could certainly constitute a rational basis for such a law. It's a neat trick to ask what possible justification there could be and then downvote the explanation.
- kibwen 9y ago> the most embarrassing, context-free 5 minutes they could find of your job The five minutes a day I spend trying to quit vim?
- arthur_trudeau 9y agoWhen your job is, eg, slaughtering pigs, or swearing at engines, or dealing with abusive customers (or abusive editors I suppose), you might reconsider.
- colanderman 9y agoSwearing at engines isn't illegal or morally reprehensible. Animal abuse is.
- GauntletWizard 9y agoValuing the lives of animals over people is morally reprehensible. Which is why I suggest eating vegans.
- arthur_trudeau 9y agoReporting on legal decisions is garbage when it doesn't even include the name of the case, or better a pointer to the opinion, so I can read the ruling myself. But it seems tenuous to me to claim that the state can criminalize trespassing, but not trespassing for the purposes of X, or conspiring to trespass to commit X, regardless of X.
- SwellJoe 9y agoThe law isn't about trespassing.
- URSpider94 9y agoThe case is 2:13-cv-00679-RJS
- wtallis 9y ago> "But it seems tenuous to me to claim that the state can criminalize trespassing, but not trespassing for the purposes of X, or conspiring to trespass to commit X, regardless of X." In this case, X is speech protected by the First Amendment. The state cannot make "trespassing for the purposes of making legal speech" a worse crime than trespassing in general.
- averagewall 9y agoHow is it ever legal to break into a business's property and secretly video the operations? You surely can't sneak into a factory and record their processes to sell to China. Is it only allowed when it's being used for protesting, not for stealing IP? Or only on farms but not in factories? What about trespass law? Non-disclosure agreements for employees? Are those invalid?
- caminante 9y agoFTA, it sounds like this law was too vague and was being leveraged to go after people, recording from "a public street." >The Utah case, filed by animal-rights groups, was the first lawsuit in the U.S. to challenge one of the ag-gag laws. It came after a woman was charged in 2013 when she filmed a front-end loader dumping a sick cow outside a suburban Salt Lake City slaughterhouse. The case was dismissed because she was standing on a public street when she made the recording.
- bdcravens 9y agoPresumably this just means that the filming isn't illegal; it doesn't mean actions taken to film are no longer subject to statutes. You can still be charged with trespassing, just not trespassing + filming.
- wtallis 9y agoThe judge explained it thus: >In short, the cases cited by the State answer the question of whether a landowner can remove someone from her property or sue for trespass even when the person wishes to exercise First Amendment rights. And generally, as the cases make clear, the answer is yes. But that is not the question before the court. The question here is whether the State (not a private landowner) can prosecute (not sue for damages) a person based on her speech on private property. [...] > In sum, the fact that speech occurs on a private agricultural facility does not render it outside First Amendment protection. Nobody disputes that owners of an agricultural facility can immediately remove from the property any person speaking in ways the owners find objectionable. But if the State wants to criminalize the same speech, it must justify the law under the First Amendment.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- downandout 9y agoIsn't trespassing, regardless of what you do once you are on private property without permission, already illegal? The video would just be evidence of the crime the person doing the filming committed by being there in the first place. It seems silly that there would need to be a separate law for this.
- redial 9y agoSome of them trespass, yes, but most of the filming is done from the outside using a powerful zoom lens, or from a drone, or more commonly, by an employee with access to the property.
- downandout 9y agoRight, but what I was referring to was this: The Utah Legislature approved a bill in 2012 that made it a class B misdemeanor to trespass on private livestock or poultry operations and record sound or images without the owner's permission. So this particular law seems like a solution without a problem, given that trespassing for any reason is already illegal.
- mercer 9y agoIf i understand correctly it's not that it wasn't illegal before, rather it wasn't a class B misdemeanor. I'm not a lawyer though.
- code_duck 9y agoIn the statute, actually they specifically list reasons that make your presence a trespass. https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter6/76-6-S206.html?v=C76-6-S206_2015051220150512 https://le.utah.gov/xcode/Title76/Chapter6/76-6-S206.html?v=... Entering property for just any reason doesn't count as trespass... you need to have some sort of malicious intent, and stay despite being reasonably warned (including by signs or a fence) that your presence is not welcome.
- deleted 9y ago
- alexjray 9y agoWhat is everyone talking about, this is good; free speech is a crucial part of our democracy. you can put up no trespassing signs, thats legitimized. Encroaching on free speech however is not.
- westnortheast 9y agoThis is great news for those that try to work to improve conditions for farm animals. Collecting this footage is already risky as it is (violent retribution is not unheard of), but remains a crucial tool in convincing people that factory farming (ie, more than ~95% of animal agriculture in the US) continues to treat animals brutally and inhumanely.
- sametmax 9y agoBesides that, if some business doesn't want to show you something, it's usually a big red flag that everyone should know about it. Business are not people, they don't have genitals to hide, they should have as little privacy as it's commercially and ethically viable.
- westnortheast 9y agoThis is great news for those that try to work to improve conditions for farm animals. Collecting this footage is already risky as it is (violent retribution is not unheard of), but remains a crucial tool in convincing people that factory farming (ie, more than ~95% of animal agriculture in the US) continues to treat animals brutally and inhumanely.
- nickhalfasleep 9y agoBesides the welfare of the animals, this is also important to the food safety and health of society to have clear insight into how food is produced.
- pvaldes 9y agoWe call it health inspectors and what they do and check is not a secret at all. Everybody can ask them about their job.
- briandear 9y agoIt actually isn’t important that society have clear insight into how food is produced. What is important is that government enforced the health and safety regulations. Does the public have the right to see the inside of the Boeing design lab? The Ford assembly line? How about a livestream of code being written that runs medical equipment? The public doesn’t have a “right” to see that. The militant vegan crowd would have the most humane slaughter in the history of the world featuring a cow that lived to a ripe old age eating nothing but grass imported from a Swiss meadow while listening to the soothing acoustic tunes of John Mayer – and they’d still portray that as if it were an ISIS beheading. Because they have an agenda and it isn’t “safety.” The FDA and the Department of Agriculture have the job to ensure health and safety. Are we making an argument that they are failing? Based on population size and geographical size, the US has a very safe food supply. These documentaries aren’t about food safety, let’s not be naïve.
- briandear 9y agoYet it is interesting that the undercover Planned Parenthood video guys where prosecuted. I am curious if the same sort of activists that applaud this decision also support anti-Planned Parenthood filmers. The cynic in me would offer that very few activists actually care about free speech – only that their speech is free. It might seem that we are all hypocrites to some degree.
- undersuit 9y ago>“The public knows the real criminals are Planned Parenthood and their business partners,” Daleiden said. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/29/felony-charges-planned-parenthood-film/99767988/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/29/felony... Abortions are not illegal in the US, nor is receiving a medical consultation on an abortion. The Planned Parenthood video guys weren't exposing a crime.
- gweinberg 9y agoIt seems strange to me that agriculture should be treated differently than any other industry.
- everybodyknows 9y agoRight. If criminalizing exposure of animal abuse in agriculture is okay, what's next? Extension of the "protection" to equestrian trainers, animal testing by pharma, and puppy mills?
- paulddraper 9y agoI'm a Utahn, have lived next to several farms/butcher operations, and have slaughtered my own animals. I don't understand how trespassing on other people's property could be anything but illegal. Yes, yes, I've heard the retoric that the industry has bad guys and bad guys don't have rights. (So stop using encryption all you bad people!) But that can't be the real reason, right? The KSL article is pretty brief. Anyone know the reason it was ruled that trespassing isn't trespassing if it's on a farm?
- bediger4000 9y agoTrespassing is illegal. I don't think that's what the judge ruled on. If someone trespasses, they should be penalized for trespassing. Ag-gag laws are usually pretty different - they basically constitute prior constraint of free speech.
- paulddraper 9y ago> The Utah Legislature approved a bill in 2012 that made it a class B misdemeanor to trespass on private livestock or poultry operations and record sound or images without the owner's permission. It also prohibited seeking employment with the intent of making those recordings. Leaving a recording device for that purpose was a class A misdemeanor. The law did not criminalize the possession or distribution of unlawful recordings, but focused on trespassing and filming while on the property, according to the state. Ah. So I infer "trespass on private livestock or poultry operations" is still illegal, but the other formely prohibited actions are now okay.