We live in an age in which technology in many of its most common forms has become priced so that it can be purchased by the masses, if they are inclined to do so. Specifically, smart phones are ubiquitous and while recordings can be done with audio/visual equipment that costs thousands upon thousands of dollars more, so too it can be done with even the most basic of smart phones.
We live in an era in which the private sector, that is, your everyday citizen, seems to have ceded more and more of their rights and more and more of their control of their life to governmental oversight, whether deliberately or not. That is to say, citizens, quite frequently have to interact with governmental employees to receive all types of governmental benefits, or governmental licensing or governmental approvals on so many activities that an average citizen cannot properly conduct their day-to-day activities without having had some sort of interaction with some governmental agency at some point.
While these interactions with governmental employees can be as basic as through internet communications such as chat and email, it is also quite common to interact with governmental employees through the telephone or in-person. All of these interactions involve private citizens, or citizens acting in such a capacity interacting with governmental employees, in which, governmental employees as a matter of function and public policy, are implicitly performing their duties as a service to their constituents.
There are many, many people that have been frustrated at one time or another with their service with governmental employees, especially frustrating is situations in which such a citizen feels powerless to effect change, as if in those situations, it is the citizen that is playing the role of begging for satisfaction or service and the governmental employee playing the role of denying such, especially in a manner that indicates insensitivity, blithe unconcern, or arrogance.
You would think, that a citizen should always have the explicit right to record one’s activities with a governmental employee, while subject to some reasonable limitations, which would help overall to improve the customer to governmental employee interaction, for a recording of such, would be not only actionable evidence, but would probably have a strong tendency to keep both parties more civil and more responsive to one another.
Indeed, there are a couple of very basic things that would support such a recording as being a citizen’s right to do, in which, the first is the fact that as citizens we have Constitutional rights that preclude the government from silencing our freedom of speech or freedom of the press, in addition to the fact that these recordings are of public employees while operating in their capacity as public employees, and not recordings of private employees or private citizens that are within their own private, not public, space.
Additionally, the main purpose of such a recording is for the protection and entitlement of citizens, so that their word and their rights are not silenced by governmental employees that overstep their bounds, in addition, it protects governmental employees from harassment and such from private citizens, who have overstep their bounds. In short, citizens should have the right to record and a right to present such a recording to a peer group that has the authority to effect change, when such evidence supports it. This would most definitely be a benefit to citizens, who simply desire that the governmental employees of which their tax dollars foundationally support, would actually provide a fair service to them and other citizens.