Apparently the state of Illinois didn't get the memo that recording the police is all the rage these days. That's because awaiting outgoing Gov. Pat Quinn's signature is legislation that would ban the practice in many circumstances.

Just last week, the state's House (by a 106 to 7 vote) and Senate (46 to 4) passed the measure. It seeks to get around an Illinois Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that struck down a previous law making it a crime to record police.

According to the Illinois Policy Institute:

The new version is nearly as bad as the old one. Under the new bill, a citizen could rarely be sure whether recording any given conversation without permission is legal. The bill would make it a felony to surreptitiously record any "private conversation," which it defines as any "oral communication between 2 or more persons," where at least one person involved had a "reasonable expectation" of privacy. When does the person you’re talking to have a reasonable expectation of privacy? The bill doesn’t say. And that’s not something an ordinary person can be expected to figure out. A law must be clear enough for citizens to know in advance whether a particular action is a crime. This bill doesn’t meet that standard, which should be reason enough for a court to strike it down if it becomes law.

The legislation comes amid a string of court decisions around the country that are slowly sticking the needle into laws barring the recording of police as they perform their duties. But some states, like Massachusetts, outlaw the secret audio recording of police. A woman accused of secretly turning on the audio recording feature of her mobile phone while she was being arrested was charged with wiretapping in May in Massachusetts.

The bill sitting on Quinn's desk comes amid calls from across the nation for cops to be equipped with body cameras. Even President Barack Obama weighed in, announcing that the administration would provide $75 million in funding to police departments to purchase said devices, and local police departments are gobbling them up as fast as they can.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation notes the pros and cons of body cameras. The most obvious benefit is that it captures police behavior. On the other hand, the EFF said, "unless used very carefully, body cameras incidentally capture footage of anyone in the line of a police officer’s sight." Another minus is that, even when horrible police conduct is recorded—such as the death of New York resident Eric Garner who died this summer via a NYPD chokehold recorded by a bystander—justice isn't always meted out. A grand jury last week declined to indict any of the several officers involved in Garner's death, a move that sparked nationwide protests.

The Illinois legislation, meanwhile, "might also provide an excuse to scuttle body cameras for police. Police may argue that using body cameras to record encounters with citizens outside of public places would violate the law, as citizens have not consented to being recorded," the Illinois Policy Institute cautions.

What's more, the Illinois legislation is vague enough that it could preclude people from recording the police, even in a public setting, the institute said.

Again, citizens can’t be expected to know for sure precisely which situations give rise to an "expectation of privacy" and which don’t. The Illinois Supreme Court said that police don’t have an expectation of privacy in "public" encounters with citizens, but it did not explain what counts as a "public" encounter. So if this bill becomes law, people who want to be sure to avoid jail time will refrain from recording police at all, and the law will therefore still effectively prevent people from recording police.

The law, a felony, carries a maximum penalty of up to four years for recording the police, an attorney general, assistant attorney general, and judges. The penalty for illegally recording a private citizen is a maximum of three years.

"There's only one apparent reason for imposing a higher penalty on people who record police in particular: to make people especially afraid to record police," the institute said. "That is not a legitimate purpose."

There's another bonus for the police, as the small-town Jacksonville Journal-Courier pointed out in a Tuesday editorial:

This little nugget is also included in this legislation: With permission of a state’s attorney, not a judge, police could legally eavesdrop on individuals for up to 24 hours without a warrant while investigating such serious crimes as murder, sexual assault or kidnapping.

The paper said there was an "unspoken danger" here: "Expanding police authority," the Journal-Courier said, "to listen in on conversations without a warrant — previously only allowed when there was a 'dangerous situation'—is a power more likely to grow rather than be curtailed."