Court Dismisses Project Veritas First Amendment Challenge, Upholds Ban on Secret Recordings

The court found that the state’s conversational privacy statute does not violate Project Veritas’s free speech rights, as the group had argued.

A judges gavel rests on top of a desk in the courtroom in Miami, Fla., on Feb. 3, 2009. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

A federal appeals court for Oregon on Tuesday upheld a decades-old state law prohibiting most secret recordings of oral conversations, rejecting a First Amendment challenge by undercover journalist group Project Veritas.

In a 9–2 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle ruled that Oregon’s conversational privacy statute does not violate Project Veritas’s free speech rights, as the group had argued.