July 14, 2008 --
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| Photo from Flickr user th.omas |
Responding to public pressure and a lawsuit by the New York Civil Liberties Union, New York City today issued rules that respect the constitutional right to photograph and film on sidewalks and other public places.
Under the new rules, which the City negotiated with the NYCLU, anyone with a handheld camera or a tripod is free to film on city sidewalks for as long as they please without a permit so long as they don’t establish a physical perimeter around or direct passersby away from more than half of a sidewalk, according to rules released by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcast.
In response to recent figures showing a 1,000 percent increase in the number of cases of police misconduct where the NYPD did nothing to prosecute offending police officers, the New York Civil Liberties Union today called for the City to remove responsibility for police misconduct prosecutions from the police department.
As the proposed congestion pricing plan moved through the New York City Council and up to Albany, the New York Civil Liberties Union asked state representatives to consider the impact the proposal would have on New Yorkers’ privacy.
On the heels of an internal report criticizing the FBI for abusing its power to issue National Security Letters (NSLs), newly unredacted documents released today as a result of an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit reveal that the that Department of Defense (DoD) is using the FBI to circumvent legal limits on its own NSL power and may have overstepped its authority to obtain private and sensitive records of people within the United States without court approval.
The New York Civil Liberties Union today filed a request for immediate emergency relief to address New York State’s broken public defense system.
