The Supreme Court has decided against hearing an investigative journalism organization’s First Amendment-based challenge to a decades-old Oregon law prohibiting most secret recordings of oral conversations.
Undercover journalism group Project Veritas had argued that the state’s conversational privacy statute violated the First Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled 9–2 in January that the law did not violate the group’s free speech rights.
The Supreme Court dismissed the petition in Project Veritas v. Vasquez without comment in an unsigned order on Oct. 6. No justices dissented.
The respondents were sued in their official capacities. One is Nathan Vasquez, district attorney for Multnomah County, Oregon; the other is Dan Rayfield, attorney general of Oregon.
In its April 7 petition, Project Veritas described Oregon’s audio recording law as “a national outlier” because it requires that “anyone in almost any conversation [be informed] that their words are being recorded.”
This requirement “severely hampers modern investigative journalism” and undermines the First Amendment “by effectively prohibiting the use of today’s most powerful reporting tools—discreet audio recordings,” the petition states.
Hellbound and Down 