Getting a lot of this kind of tweet this morning, so let's talk about it a bit.
First: My original tweets on the subject were on morality and ethics, not the law. What you legally CAN do and what you SHOULD do are often very different—in both directions. (You CAN do stuff you shouldn't, and you SHOULD do stuff you're not allowed to.)
With that out of the way, let's look at a few examples of stuff that might happen in public that it might be proper for a journalist or other observer to treat as private.
(Note that I'm not looking for up-or-down votes on these—my whole point in the original thread was that these are complicated issues on which we don't have consensus, and about which reasonable people may disagree.)
Example: A state legislator is overheard in a public park talking to his best friend about his recent terminal cancer diagnosis. It's clear from the conversation that his children don't yet know he's dying.
Example: A woman who escaped an abusive husband years earlier attends a political rally. She asks a news photographer not to take and publish photos of her because they could lead to her former husband in finding her.
Example: A celebrity's fifteen-year-old child tells her mother, in a restaurant, that she's pregnant. She says she wants to have an abortion, and the two have a discussion about it. Someone surreptitiously tapes the conversation on their smartphone.
Example: A private citizen speaks at a small Take Back The Night march about her rape. Before she begins, she asks everyone present to turn off their recording devices because her family doesn't know about the assault.
Example: The parent of a murdered child sits quietly at the place their child was killed during a vigil. A friend of the family stands nearby, asking reporters not to approach or photograph the parent.
Example: Police pull a woman out of a protest march because they're offended by something she was chanting. As they arrest her, her shirt is pulled up, exposing her breasts. News photographers are present.
None of these are examples of people doing anything illegal or immoral, and in each case they describe incidents that occur in a public place, but in each case there's at least an argument to be made that they should be treated as private.
Now a thought experiment: Pick the one of these examples for which you fall most heavily on the "private" side of the argument. Imagine it's happening to you or a loved one. Would you interfere with someone who was trying to record it for publication? If so, how far would you go?
As I said in my thread yesterday, I think these are complicated questions, and ones we haven't yet arrived at consensus answers to.
"There's no expectation of privacy in a public space" is not a useful response to these questions—a moment's thought will show we have an expectation of privacy for all sorts of public acts.
"Don't do anything in public that you would be embarassed to see in the newspaper" is similarly unhelpful. Embarassment is just one of many reasons a person would want privacy.
Similarly, "interfering with a journalist's work is necessarily an act of hostility to free speech" is, in my view, an unsustainable position.
One last thing: I think the vast majority of journalists understand this stuff and address it pretty conscientiously in their work.
I'm not calling for new standards for journalists. I'm calling for consistent application of those standards, and encouraging non-journalists to think about how those standards operate—and should operate—in real-world situations.
