Is Chicago really planning on detaining anyone who records protestor arrests at the G-8 summit?

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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/01/recording_police_making_arrests_the_outrageous_illinois_law_that_makes_it_a_felony_.html

In three months, thousands of reporters from around the globe will descend on Chicago for the G-8 summit. Part of what they will chronicle is the protests and police crackdowns that have made each annual meeting so newsworthy. Sadly for all these reporters, and for all the American journalists with plans to film the protestors and cops, any effort to audiotape police activity on public streets or in parks is a crime in Illinois—a crime punishable by 15 years in prison.

Illinois, like Massachusetts and Oregon, is famous for having one of the most draconian eavesdropping laws in the country. The New York Times recently profiled two Illinois citizens who ran afoul of the law that makes it a Class 1 felony to audio record a law-enforcement officer, state’s attorney, assistant state’s attorney, attorney general, assistant attorney general or judge in the performance of his or her duties. It is a crime to use any device “for the purpose of hearing or recording all or any part of any conversation … unless [done] with the consent of all of the parties to such conversation or electronic communication. …”

One of the two individuals facing a felony conviction is an artist charged with using a digital recorder when he was arrested in 2009 for selling art without a permit. The other is a woman who used her BlackBerry to record Internal Affairs investigators who were interviewing her last August in connection with a sexual harassment complaint she’d filed against a police officer. The ACLU filed a suit last summer, challenging the Illinois law as a violation of the First Amendment and burdening the right of citizens to monitor law enforcement. The suit has been dismissed twice. Wiretapping statutes apply to audio recordings. In 12 states police must give consent to being recorded, but in most of those states, it’s a violation of the wiretap laws only if there is an expectation that the interaction with police is private. It’s hard to make the case that police arrests on public thoroughfares are private activities, although, as Radley Balko showed last year, that hasn’t stopped some states from trying. In Massachusetts and Illinois, however, there is no “expectation of privacy” requirement at all. But whereas in Massachusetts if you hold your recording device in plain sight, the case won’t be prosecuted, courts in Illinois have arrested (and charged) those who are openly recording as well as those who do so in secret.

A bill now pending in the Illinois General Assembly would amend the state law to preclude criminal prosecution for the “[r]ecording of a peace officer who is performing a public duty in a public place and speaking at a volume audible to the unassisted human ear.” That’s a start. And last August, the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Constitution protects citizens who film police carrying out their duties in public. Last week a civil jury in Eugene, Ore. even found that a police officer violated an environmental activist's Fourth Amendment rights by seizing and searching his video camera without a warrant.