Comment camera clamps for hire, and policy zones (Score 1) 442
The pace of government unfortunately means that much legislation of this type is now, and will for decades to come, reflect a time where a camera was a big box with a protruding lens out front, exposing images on roll film (and music was printed on vinyl).
Given the ubiquity of camera enabled gadgets that is increasingly going to be needed all day, also when entering a "camera free zone", they will need to come up with some short term solutions.
Phones have so many shapes and models, and the rentacop guarding the entrance can't be guaranteed accept individual solutions and nonstandardized documentation for disconnected cameras apparently physically still in place. For a long while it is going to be easier and simpler to just outright ban phones from the outside and instead rent out approved dumb and blind phones. Have a phone locker system where you can place the temporarily surrendered phones at the entrance, shouldn't take up much space. In GSM territories swapping SIM cards remains pretty simple. An dumb and blind phone approved for a particular facility could easily be fitted with location based policy awareness so as to for example mute and silence it and prevent any phone conversations or texting or active microphones in a courtroom or other site blacked out on a policy basis. The rented phone also comes with a noise maker and a RFID tag for doorway gates so you won't forget to swap it for your own phone on the way out. Let phone rental fees pay for this program.
Laptops have microphones and can record and comes in as many configurations as cellphones, but with even greater variety of software. Again the nonstandardized solutions may not impress guards on duty. Microphone recording capability can't be helped, but given that most laptops have the camera placed in roughly the same location near the top center of the screen, you could probably get away with a rental program for little clamp-on lens-blocking boot things that you rent at the entrance and which would make some noise if removed unauthorized. While in place a LED should flash to indicate the gadget is doing its thing so that any officials in a given site seeing a laptop can quickly verify its camera is blocked.
All this is temporary craziness, on par with archaic and short-perspective laws from back when we went from horse and carriage traffic to automobiles. Eventually we're going to have to figure out a common, open location-based service system accessible by all our mobile gadgets. Such a system would among many practical things offer location based policies that phones and laptops and dedicated recording equipment would understand and could be set to respect, and to provide some manner of verifiable, signed feedback to the system that the gadget in fact is in conformance with the area policy.
Vernor Vinge has some interesting speculation on how a mandatory enforcement scheme for these kinds of policies might look like in his book "Rainbows End".