Tolkkinen: As a recent Minnesota dustup shows, First Amendment ‘auditors’ with cameras are terrorizing people

The First Amendment champion nobody wants rode into Albert Lea in July.

He wore a mask and sunglasses and started silently filming people shopping outside a sidewalk sale in front of the Homestead Boutique, a small store that sells women’s clothes, gifts and home decor.

It wasn’t long before customers started realizing they were being filmed. One ducked away. Store owner Angela Moller confronted the man using a classic Minnesota Nice technique.

“Hello!” she said. “Can I help you?”

She was wearing a “Birthday Girl” tiara.

No answer.

“Are you …,” She hesitated. “With a station?”

Moller laughed nervously as the camera followed her around. She invited his viewers to Crazy Days. Then, growing serious, she asked him politely not to film her customers.

Still no response. The guy was waiting for something. And he got it. Moller’s husband, Matt Moller, emerged from the store, looking none too happy. Moller raised his own camera to get the guy’s photo, then tried to move him along. The guy wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t speak and he wouldn’t move.

The guy kept filming. He filmed kids and the elderly, men and women. He recorded fragments of conversation. The big, brave man kept his own face hidden, though.

“Why do you have to make it weird, dude?” Matt Moller asked.

The man wouldn’t say. Eventually a cop showed up. The guy, who remains nameless and anonymous, had already visited City Hall and the library, filming people over their objections. The police knew about him.

It obviously didn’t matter to him that his actions made people feel scared or intimidated or angry. It obviously didn’t matter to him that just weeks earlier, a masked man murdered one of the state’s best-known legislators and her husband and shot two others. It didn’t appear to matter to him at all that in a nation where hundreds of mass shootings occur each year, people might get a little nervous around a masked stranger silently videotaping them.

“My rights don’t end where your feelings begin,” he said, which is also the mantra of the site where his video ended up.

And there was nothing anyone could do.

The man is part of a network of “First Amendment auditors” who post videos on social media. It’s not a new phenomenon; it’s been around since at least COVID days. The so-called auditors loiter around city halls and libraries, ignoring requests for identification and filming staff and members of the public despite pleas to stop, proving, I guess, that they have a constitutional right to be jerks. Hopefully they don’t turn people against the First Amendment along the way.

Before long, Albert Lea’s video was posted on YouTube for the whole world to watch. So far, it’s gotten 19,000 views. I’ve been debating whether to give it any more exposure, but my job is to reveal, not conceal. So, if you must, the link is there. He also further demonstrates his own courage by posting under a pseudonym.

I looked at some of this guy’s other videos. From a sidewalk he filmed a family at a restaurant eating dinner outdoors. He filmed women outdoors who were getting ready for a wedding. He pursued an older woman at a library who covered her face with her hands and begged him not to film her and kept going even when staff tried to protect her. And he has a thing against Karens. (I won’t even go there.)

One guy chased after him and said, “Were you filming my girlfriend?” followed by the most satisfying scuffle in which the camera appeared to spiral into the air.

Yes, Americans have the right to film in public places. That doesn’t mean we should.

I have a few suggestions for dealing with these “auditors.”

One, we could carry collapsible privacy sheets. We could call them “Privacy on a stick.” When someone starts filming us, we pull out a privacy sheet and block our faces. They could have messages on the camera side, like a middle finger or something more polite, like, “Go play in traffic.”

Three, we could acknowledge that no matter how unpleasant, filming in public is less egregious than fines and jail sentences. And when they come around, ignore them. “All they want is your reaction,” my mom used to tell me. Without reactions, nobody will watch their footage and pretty soon they’ll go away.

We hope.