By Jan Wolfe
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by the conservative activist group Project Veritas to invalidate on constitutional free speech grounds an Oregon law that generally bans unannounced recordings of conversations.
The justices turned away the group’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that upheld the law and found that it did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s protections against government abridgment of free speech.
Oregon is one of a handful of states that make it a crime to record conversations unless all parties are notified. There are several exceptions to the ban, including ones that allow for recording interactions with on-duty police officers and conversations taking place during a violent felony.
The law relaxes the notification requirement in contexts in which recording is commonplace like public meetings and press conferences.
Project Veritas filed its legal challenge to the Oregon law in 2020, saying the Oregon statute unlawfully impedes undercover journalists who investigate corruption and work with whistleblowers. The group’s lawyers said the law made it impossible to record protests about racial injustice in Portland, the state’s largest city, following the killing that year of a Black man named George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
Project Veritas frequently publishes edited recordings that portray liberal organizations and media negatively. Critics have called its tactics deceptive.
Oregon has argued that the law does not discriminate based on content, and that recording private conversations is not constitutionally protected “expressive conduct.”
Democratic Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a court filing that the First Amendment also protects the freedom to choose whether to speak publicly.
“Just because the conversation takes place in public – which, in (Project Veritas’) view, apparently includes cafes and other places that intimate conversations take place – does not mean that it is meant to be shared with the whole world,” the court filing stated.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle issued a 9-2 decision in January finding that Oregon’s law was narrowly tailored to the state’s significant governmental interest in ensuring that residents know when they are being recorded.
Circuit Judge Morgan Christen in that ruling warned of the risk of secret recordings being shared across the internet, or selectively edited to create audio “deepfakes” in which people appear to say things they never said.
That decision reversed an earlier 2-1 ruling in favor of Project Veritas by a three-judge 9th Circuit panel, which concluded that Oregon’s law “violates the First Amendment right to free speech and is therefore invalid on its face.”
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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