The United States is facing a worsening recession, an expanding war in Afghanistan, and global warming. Yet, New York Republican Rep. Peter King believes that one of the more pressing matters for Congress should be to require that all cell phones make a click or sound when taking a picture. It is the basis for his “Camera Phone Predator Alert Act” to protect the unwary from the unscrupulous.
The King bill states that “Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone.” The solution is to require a sound “audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone.”
It is a bold move but the bill notably does not include other predatorial picture takers like oil painters. Some of the classics show women in highly revealing circumstances and some artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec were known to lurk around prostitutes and dancers. The solution is to require all brushes to have a small devices that produces a squeak when it moves across canvas. The “Painter Predator Alert Act” will be the perfect book end for this year’s King legislative effort.
King introduced this legislation in 2007 but found that it . . . well . . . failed to click with colleagues.
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This is yet another example of our tax dollars being completely wasted.
I wonder who’s going to be making the big bucks off a bill like this
I think there should be a technical legal term for this type of proposal: “Microlegislation.”
Defined as a legislative proposal on a subject so trivial and insignificant as to be atomic in its miniscularity.
Note that microlegislation very, very seldom makes it into law. There are too many obstacles and too much common sense around for that to happen.
It is usually issued with a burst of publicity for the guy who proposes it.
Then he and the bill then fade into obscurity after their 15 seconds of fame.
and how many others had the immediate reaction — boy, any Dudley-Do-WRONG police would love that! would make it so much easier to locate those pesky cameras, like on the BART platform… or in less heavily-populated situations.
Perhaps Rep. King could sponsor a bill that requires a background “beep” when the government is monitoring your phone calls as part of dragnet surveillance?
Or a “click” noise that comes over your radio when your car is recorded on photo radar?
Or a “read” receipt when the NSA has successfully stored a copy of the email you just sent?
puzzling,
We’d be forced to mitigate the noise pollution! LOL!!!
Although I agree with the commentators who are frustrated with this example of micro-legislation, I’m not completely adverse to some sort of sound identifier for phone camera shots as a result of Tracy Clark-Flory’s Salon article about upskirt photographers. Even so, this sort of regulation would be addressed better in other places and at other times.