For Immediate Release: November 6, 2025

A Loss for Transparency, a Win for Government Secrecy: Supreme Court Ruling Makes It Harder to Expose Corruption

WASHINGTON, DC — At a time when government officials increasingly insulate themselves from public scrutiny and the press—restricting access to the White House press secretary’s office, controlling journalists’ reporting and movements at the Pentagon, and replacing open town halls with electronic screenings—the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered another setback to transparency.

By refusing to hear a challenge to an Oregon law criminalizing the act of recording one’s own conversations without notifying all parties, the Supreme Court has made it even harder for journalists, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens to hold the powerful accountable.

The Rutherford Institute had urged the Supreme Court to hear the appeal in Project Veritas v. Vasquez, arguing that the state’s all-party consent law violates the First Amendment by chilling the speech of whistleblowers, victims of abuse, and anyone seeking to record proof of official misconduct. There is a significant incentive from politicians, government officials, law enforcement, and others in power to prohibit such recordings so that they can maintain deniability about what they actually said or did when they thought no one was recording them.

“We live in an age when truth is treated as a threat and demands for accountability as treason. When those who wield power control the narrative and punish those who challenge it, the First Amendment becomes little more than a relic of a free society,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “The machinery of secrecy in government is now running at full throttle. While lobbyists roam the halls of Congress and slip in and out of the White House, average Americans are fenced off behind security barriers, free-speech zones, and now even laws that make documenting official misconduct a crime. If citizens can’t freely record what officials say and do even in public spaces, the government can rewrite history with impunity. Restrictions on self-recording don’t protect privacy—they protect power.”

Oregon’s law, like similar statutes in states such as California and Florida, criminalizes recording any conversation unless all parties are informed. Such laws have been used to punish investigative reporting and even citizens seeking to document abuse or corruption. One Florida resident was charged simply for recording his own phone calls with police officers to file a complaint. Project Veritas, a nonprofit media organization that seeks to discover and disclose official misconduct, claimed its newsgathering and reporting is chilled by Oregon’s law, because having to announce that a conversation is being recorded causes individuals to either refuse to talk or distort their story.

Despite acknowledging that Project Veritas’s newsgathering activities constitute protected speech, a divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Oregon law. In its amicus brief calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case, The Rutherford Institute warned that such laws threaten not only journalists but also whistleblowers and victims of domestic violence, sexual harassment, and government misconduct—anyone who needs a recording to prove the truth.

Ethan H. Townsend, A.J. Kritikos, and Maura R. Cremin of McDermott Will & Schulte LLP advanced the arguments in the amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

This press release is also available at www.rutherford.org.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/4fkmmpaz

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