Digital Home Thoughts: INDYSTAR.com: "Congress Takes Aim at Digital Peepers"

"Congress is aiming to punish digital-age peeping Toms who secretly snoop on people with cell-phone cameras and other high-tech gadgets. Lawmakers say a growing trend of video voyeurism threatens personal privacy and dignity in an era when indecent images can be beamed onto the Internet in seconds with tiny, low-cost cameras. Legislation moving through Congress would make it a federal crime to surreptitiously film, videotape or photograph unsuspecting people in places like locker rooms and public bathrooms..."

I'm not a big believer in the legal system being able to solve issues around technology, because technology will always out-pace the laws - yet somehow the idea of it being legal for someone to use a cameraphone in a changing room seems wrong. I'm not overly familiar with US laws in this regard, but I believe they allow your photo to be taken if you're in a public place. But that means that unless you're on your own property, everything else is fair game. I don't know how this jives with model release forms though - when I was writing articles for Microsoft's PocketPC.com site and I had a picture of someone on the Pocket PC screen, MS legal required a model release form before they'd publish the image. So is taking the photos legal, but publishing them illegal without a model release form?