All these legal restrictions of free speech are permitted

Maybe we should look at getting rid of some of those.

Couldn’t you make the opposite argument? That if police know they COULD be videotaped performing their actions in public and that they are UNABLE to stop the videotaping, they are can focus solely on performing their duties.

Anyone who lives in the public eye (celebrity, politician, police officer, etc….) should always go about their job, and even their off-duty public activities, as if a camera crew was following them around. If they are uncomfortable with that or cannot live up to the standard it requires, they may want to choose a different profession.

Posner’s examples of restrictions of free speech strike me as fairly questionable, in various different ways, as follows:

defamation law

Aka the Streisand Effect law. These days using it seems to be worse than useless. The best way to counter defamation seems to be with more speech. Maybe it always was.

copyright law

Color me radical, but I suspect we’d actually get on just fine without this.

trade secret law

And this.

and trademark law

And possibly this. See false advertising, below.

tort liability for wiretapping, other electronic eavesdropping,

The act of wiretapping is not speech, though the act of disclosing the results is. Wiretapping and other eavesdropping should still be regulated.

and publicly depicting a person in a ?false light?;

See defamation law, above.

laws criminalizing the publication of military secrets

This may be necessary, but I’d say it should be starkly limited:

1. Like present trade secrets, once there’s widespread knowledge proved among rival nation-states the secret status should be automatically lost.

2. Secrets relating to battle maneuvers or other things like that should only be enforced in wartime; and should have a short time limit on the secrecy. Once the secret battle plan has been used (or rendered moot) in battle, after all, the reason for keeping it secret no longer applies.

3. Secrets relating to capabilities and weapons systems should lose secrecy once these are widely known, per 1 above, or obsolete, unless they would if revealed enable small-scale actors to construct WMDs.

4. Likely nothing else should be eligible for military secrecy save a) battle plans and similar matter (and only during wartime; e.g. stuff analogous to the D-Day plans and landing sites) and b) the stuff in item 3 above.

and the dissemination of child pornography;

More controversial, but this should probably also not be criminal. The dissemination, in and of itself, harms no-one, and it’s increasingly possible to become guilty in that area inadvertently. Furthermore, criminalizing it encourages the concealment and destruction of evidence of much more serious crimes, even by people who come across such evidence without themselves having been involved in those crimes and who would not otherwise have a motive to do so.

conspiracy law (thus including much of antitrust law);

As I understand it, conspiracy law doesn’t prohibit speech per se. Rather it prohibits certain combinations of speech and action, since an action in furtherance of the conspiracy is required for guilt. So, much stronger free speech guarantees are not incompatible with conspiracy law.

prohibitions of criminal solicitation,

If this means soliciting criminal acts, e.g. paying someone to kill someone, that should be coverable under other laws, e.g. attempted murder.

threats and fighting words,

I’m not sure these should be prohibited. “Threats” are sometimes in jest. Fiction could be taken out of context. On the other hand, credible threats should remain grounds for closer scrutiny and possible intervention. For instance, the one who uttered the threat may be surveilled and if they try something jailed for assault or whatever. Or the one threatened can use it as grounds to obtain a restraining order, violation of which can again lead to the threatener being jailed.

securities fraud,

Like conspiracy law, this one requires more than just speech. It requires a financial transaction as well. For example, touting a stock after buying some at a low price, then selling when the price goes up. Touting a stock you have no financial interest in would be pure speech.

and false advertising of quack medical remedies;

False advertising in general seems to again be a problem specifically in combination with a transaction: the sale to a consumer confused or misled as to the origin, nature, efficacy, or whatever of the product. I’d suggest that a sale under such circumstances constitutes fraud, and that fraud law can be used in lieu of distinct false advertising law and also in lieu of trademark law. Passing off Bob’s Cola as Coca-Cola to a paying customer would simply constitute fraud.

the regulation of marches, parades, and other demonstrations whatever their objective;

Why should such things be regulated? If the activity is peaceful and nonobstructive there’s no legitimate need, if it’s violent there are existing laws against assault, and if it’s obstructing traffic or creating some other nuisance there are generally laws that cover that, such as city noise bylaws.

limitations on free speech in prisons;

Another one of questionable necessity. If you’re worried about prisoners communicating with confederates on the outside to operate criminal enterprises, it’s privacy of speech in prisons that is the problem, not freedom of speech in prisons. Disallow encryption products and monitor all communications, except for privileged lawyer-client ones.

laws limiting the televising of judicial proceedings;

Questionable necessity.

what little is left of permitted regulation of campaign expenditures;

Questionable effectiveness. We *do* need to get the influence of money out of politics but I don’t think restricting campaign expenditures works very well. There are too many other ways for lobbyists to ply politicians with goodies, including simply “not doing it during a campaign”. Perhaps we could require instead that politicians take a vow of poverty in exchange for lifetime welfare, or create a fund that provides equal funding to anyone running for office to what they can prove their competitors have received, or something like that to level the playing field. Or maybe it will solve itself. The issue of large corporate entities being able to skew media presentation of campaigners and issues by, in large part, owning the media may go away in the Internet age as the old broadcast media become increasingly irrelevant — if, that is, we preserve strong free speech on the internet and avoid too much concentration of market power in too few ISPs.

public school disciplining of inflammatory or disruptive student speech;

Absolutely disagree that there should be such “disciplining”.

the attorneyclient, spousal, and physician-patient privileges in cases in which an attorney or spouse or physician would like to speak but is forbidden by the privilege to do so;

I’m not even sold on the merits of these. In the attorney and physician cases, blabbing about confidential stuff could be regarded as an ethics breach by the professional bar, rather than being policed by the government; that would enable the privilege to exist without a government limitation on free speech.

laws making medical records confidential;

See above, and see eavesdropping further above for when it’s a leak rather than voluntary disclosure by a custodian of the records.

and prohibitions against the public disclosure of jurors? names in cases in which jurors might be harassed.

Similar to “uttering threats”, perhaps the solution is not to limit speech but to enhance enforcement of the law you fear will be broken — violent crime laws in the case of threats and harassment laws in this case.