If you think your cell phone camera gives you a license to voyeurism, think again: U.S. federal lawmakers want to clip you for six figures and clap you in the clink if you use it for peeping on federal property, while New Zealand lawmakers are pondering likewise.
The U.S. Senate gave voice approval December 7 to a bill the House passed in September, which could impose fines up to $100,000 for a conviction and a prison term up to a year for sneaking images of people "in various stages of undress," as one report phrased it. President Bush is expected to sign the bill.
The bill would only cover federal jurisdictions and properties, like office buildings, national parks, military bases, and others, but it makes exceptions for work involving law enforcement, intelligence, and prison.
Several states have anti-camera voyeurism laws in effect, with the two most recent being Florida and South Dakota, both of whom enacted theirs in July. New York based civil liberties attorney Hanan Kolko said the federal law sets a national standard that could be followed by other states struggling to write and pass such laws. Especially with cell phone cameras taking voyeurism out of bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, and dressing rooms and into the mall, the grocery store, the street, and the restaurant, as another report put it.
"It's pretty narrowly crafted," Kolko told reporters about the U.S. proposal, "and protects those parts of a person's body that they wouldn't want to be photographed or videotaped, and especially now that photography and video images can be downloaded and transmitted across the Internet within seconds around the world, it gives people protection from worldwide exposure without their consent," he said.
New Zealand lawmakers also want to send cell phone cam peepers to the slammer, but they're ready to get even tougher than the U.S. Congress: a proposal making its way around the federal government there would put those who make, publish, or distribute voyeuristic material without consent – whether gathered on cell phone cameras or other devices – would be looking at up to three years behind bars, while merely possessing voyeur material would get you up to a year.
This move is part of a New Zealand bid to crack down on upskirt and other voyeur imagery, which Justice Minister Phil Goff said is "the most serious form of intrusion that someone can make into the privacy of another individual, filming them in the most intimate situations that you can imagine."
Goff told the BBC technology has made voyeurism "much worse…. We've got to update the legislation to cater for the changes in technology which make it easier for people both to capture the images and to distribute them."
New Zealand officials are also said to be looking to amend federal laws to let voyeur victims seek redress in the civil courts.
