I would love to know where that weird precedent came from and why nobody has challenged it yet. It seems on the face of it to make no sense legally or semantically.

Going back to basics, free speech is about communicating information. Getting information is a completely different process, and while there are strong arguments either way about how and where it should be free or controlled, they are all completely irrelevant to the question of free speech.

In European law there are strong defences of the right of privacy, specifically inspired by the problem of prying cameras (though usually in the hands of paparazzi rather than private voyeurs,) and I'm pretty sure (IANAL) that a case like this would be settled on that basis. The fact that this has to be balanced against the right of free speech is an ongoing debate, but nobody to my knowledge has ever argued here that taking pictures is free speech.