A Veritas Victory addresses another big picture solution.

This will receive less attention than some of PV's other work.

Project Veritas (PV) got its start with James O’Keefe working with just a few other people to expose the shady and even illegal activities of Barack Obama’s ACORN. Don’t believe the left wing smears of the ACORN takedown, nor the smears of PV in general, but do note that one of ACORN’s employees used a California law against secretly recording people as part of his lawsuit against O’Keefe long ago. O’Keefe settled the lawsuit to keep his legal costs down, but regrets doing so.

Fast forward over 10 years, and PV actually causes Oregon to stop prosecuting the publishing of secret recordings.

The SCOTUS issued a decision way back in 2001 that allows the publishing of secret recordings based on the 1st amendment, but it did not invalidate those laws against recording. All of those laws need to be invalidated as they are written right now.

If the issue is one private individual secretly recording another private individual about personal matters that do not involve criminal or civil violations, then of course neither the person doing the recording nor anyone else should be allowed to publish that recording. Donald Trump telling dirty jokes to one other man in private would be an excellent example. And if you think men telling dirty jokes in private is newsworthy, even if one of those men is a political candidate, you are sadly mistaken. If you’re a man and can truthfully say that you’ve never told dirty jokes to other men or have never had them told to you, you’re legitimately pathetic and have probably never had any male friends, but again I digress.

On the other hand, you should be able to simply record private conversations for reference, or if you suspect the person may plan to discuss something illegal. Consider the example of a woman who has been abused or threatened by her husband or boyfriend at some point. You absolutely want that woman to be able to record the man to get hard evidence of the threats and/or abuse.

In fact, given the prevalence of video recording devices, mostly cell phones, I think judges should require video evidence of supposed abuse or threats when women in divorce cases start making accusations against their husbands. In many, many cases women in these circumstances will exaggerate greatly or outright lie. In the vast majority of these instances, the accusations are such that it would have easily been possible for the woman to have captured the all alleged behavior on video. These situations would still not result in giving anyone the right to publish the recording(s), unless and until the person who was recorded was convicted of a crime.

In another realm entirely, if you are a government employee, or an employee of a company trying to affect public policy in any way, even just with voter registration drives, your commentary should be publishable by anyone who records you. And anyone and everyone should be allowed to record you as they see fit. If dozens of people can stand around and record police officers doing their jobs during the most difficult parts of their jobs, and I’m all for this as long as people keep their distance and do not try to verbally interfere with the police, then it’s fair for others who deal with the public to be recorded.

This rule would apply to most people in the public realm to any extent, including people involved in the “news” business. News outlets, whether real or fake news, are involved in delivering information to the public. What they have to say behind the scenes about non personal issues is therefore in the public interest. (If they’re bragging about their sex lives or other strictly personal information in most cases that could still not be published.) So there should be no valid laws in any state which serve to keep relevant information from the public. When you can freely record public sector people, you can expose corruption and illegal behavior more easily.

For the most part for the past few decades or more, these laws in various states have mostly been used to protect democrats and assorted leftists engaged in illicit and often illegal activities. Just like how democrats have worked so hard to cover up the 2020 election data, they like to cover up anything which makes them look bad. We need more victories like this one that PV just got, and a sweeping one to allow people in all states to freely record others that they are dealing with.