“You’re completely ignoring the concept of morality, aka social norms. As @jsroberts pointed out, it may be legal to film at a nude beach, but its certainly not ok.” -yes, I’m ignoring them intentionally. Social norms vary widely across the United States, not to mention the world as a greater whole.
Do we expect people from other states, countries, locales, upbringings, to just understand our “social norms”? What is acceptable here in my state is as likely not to be somewhere else.
There are also civil infractions to consider. These are situations that are covered by exactly this type of behavior. You can be escorted off a public beach by the police for being an asshole without actually breaking any laws. And yes, you are right – a lot of laws are based in basic morality. Take public indecency and or public intoxication, for example.
However, it is not a crime to be an asshole anywhere as far as I can tell. Otherwise, 75% of this country would be behind bars!
I would expect that as this issue grows with remote cameras, cameras with increased capability, drones, quad copter’s, you name it – issues will present themselves and laws that protect citizens in these situations will arise out of it. Until then, that is absolutely not okay to enact vigilante justice.
At the end of the day, if someone is being an asshole to you your choices are either a) tell them to cut it out and or call the cops if they are actually harassing you, or b) go home. It Is a crappy set of choices, but sometimes those are the only ones we have: crappy ones.
I am by no means saying this issue does not deserve consideration and looking into from higher legal authorities. However, I do believe there is a point where people need to drop the emotional aspects of it and the "social norm "aspect of it and look at what their actual rights are in the situation.
People have the right to be assholes, people don’t have the right to beat them up for it. Unless that changes, people should just keep their hands to themselves.
