Project Veritas v. Schmidt, 125 F.4th 929 (9th Cir. 2025)
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in Project Veritas v. Schmidt, 125 F.4th 929 (9th Cir. 2025) that Oregon's conversational privacy statute, which requires notice before recording oral conversations, is constitutional and does not violate the First Amendment.
Another bad decision by a poorly functioning court. It seems like we once again fail to protect the First Amendment. Privacy is the right to ensure your communications aren't intercepted, not to prevent others from repeating them.
A wrongdoer simply stops wrongdoing if they are told they are being recorded. Secret recording is essential to journalism.
There are obviously cases where we will find the sensibilities of persons would be offended if secret recording was allowed, such as cases where a person is secretly recorded in the nude. But we cannot let the existence of such compelling circumstances that might exist in particular circumstances to prevent recording to somehow lower the bar for such restrictions to a mere intermediate scrutiny level.
Restrictions on recording restrict the content of the files produced on the devices, they are therefore content based restrictions on speech.
Moreover, privacy cannot in such circumstances serve as an important or compelling purpose. Privacy of this sort, the right to silence others and prevent sharing of information regarding ones misdeeds, is the antithesis of a free society. A free press cannot maintain our democracy if secret recording, an essential tool for exposing misconduct, is restricted.
Privacy has been turned into a justification to silence and muzzle those that would expose wrongdoing, and this version of privacy, which is not based on whether someone should have had access to information, but whether or not they might repeat it, is one of the most dangerous threats to our first amendment freedoms in recent memory.
This quasi-democractic republic is turning into an authoritarian republic, much like Russia. I hope that this trend does reverse soon.