Illinois General Assembly passes bill to ban citizens from recording police

While the Illinois media’s attention was fixated on whether the General Assembly would raise the state’s minimum wage or make the 67% temporary income tax hike permanent (neither of which ended up passing), it has virtually ignored major changes on the entire state’s system that legislators passed during the lame duck session before adjourning for the rest of 2014.

For starters, Springfield passed a bill that established yet another state-run retirement system that will affect at least 2.5 million private sector workers. SB 2758 received virtually no press coverage or scrutiny from the Illinois media all year long, as the Illinois Mirror illustrated earlier this year. The legislation targets small businesses with 25 or more employees and forces them to not only set up mandatory Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) but also automatically deduct at least 3% from their employees’ paychecks to fund them. An employee would have to actively pursue “opting out” if they did not want to participate in the State-operated IRA program.

SB 2758 attempts to construct a government program that largely duplicates IRA services already widely available in the private market for anyone interested in retirement savings. It exposes the state and private employers to a liability risk, despite the bill’s purported protections against lawsuits (this is Illinois, after all). It also opens the door for likely litigation over whether a state can compel participation in a program that its sponsors – state Senators Daniel Biss (D-Evanston) and Michael Frerichs (D-Champaign) – sold as “voluntary.”

Like the Affordable Care Act (ACA), SB 2758 is a mandate on employers, not an option. Small employers will face additional costs for the payroll deductions if they use a payroll service, or face additional administrative costs if they do payroll themselves – added costs similar to what the ACA does. Much like what many suspect the intent of the ACA was in incentivizing small business employers to dump employees into the state exchanges rather than cover healthcare costs themselves, this bill would also incentivize employers to dump their employees into these State-managed IRAs rather than creating their own 401(K)s.

For a bill with as many wide-reaching consequences on the fiscal state and private sector job climate of Illinois, it’s amazing how little reporting it received. Even since its passage Dec. 4, the only media outlets to mention anything about it were Crain’s, Watchdog.org, and WTTW’s “Chicago Tonight.”

What’s received even less media attention is a revived ban on recording police officers the General Assembly also passed during the lame duck session that the state Supreme Courtstruck down earlier this year.

In what was regarded as the country’s strictest recording ban prohibiting citizens from recording conversations with police on camera or anyone else without the other person’s permission, the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision in a case called People v. Melongo held that the law “criminalize[d] a wide range of innocent conduct” and violated free-speech rights. In particular, the court noted the state could not criminalize recording activities where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, including citizens’ “public” encounters with police.

Source:http://www.illinoismirror.com/springfield-passes-state-run-retirement-bans-citizens-from-recording-police-again-where-are-media/