OPINION:
A federal court has granted activist groups a license to spy on any business opposed to their agenda.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals wants to be the first to flex the new power after finding a handful of sympathetic judges willing to overturn North Carolina’s so-called ag gag law on First Amendment grounds.
Yet this is about more than free speech. Individuals could conceivably sign up to work for a company under false pretenses, pilfer documents and profit from that intellectual property unless the Supreme Court steps in and reverses this bad decision.
Justices are now gathering to select the cases worthy of review in the upcoming term.
Lawmakers in Raleigh decided eight years ago that groups should be held accountable for their conduct after PETA extremists outlined their scheme of lying on job applications to gain access to areas of farms and other businesses where they could secretly film animals being slaughtered.
While such visuals are unpleasant, it’s the sort of thing that has happened on farms and ranches every day for thousands of years. Yet the stealthily recorded videos were to be the centerpiece of a propaganda campaign.
North Carolina’s law thwarted the plan by making it a crime to lie to gain access to a business and set up covert surveillance equipment or steal documents. PETA immediately filed suit to block the law, saying their members should be allowed to sneak in anywhere they please, take whatever data and surveil anyone simply by claiming they are engaging in First Amendment activity.
The statute excluded the conduct of legitimate whistleblowers and law enforcement investigations, ensuring that it applied only to people — whether individuals or as members of an organization — who used false pretenses to gather intelligence they would not have been able to obtain by honest means.
A sharply divided 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel sided with the extremists, spurring Judge Allison Jones Rushing to pen a brilliant dissent explaining why the core issues involved have little to do with the First Amendment. She explained how the majority’s ruling could be abused by nefarious workers for personal gain.
“Using recorded information to launch a competing product, to steal customers, or to blackmail management come to mind,” she wrote. “This is because using information is not the same as speaking.”
A reporter can’t just barge into your home and plant listening devices, and an activist shouldn’t be able to do so at a business. Perhaps G. Gordon Liddy’s biggest mistake at the Watergate trial was his failure to claim he attempted to bug the Democratic National Committee headquarters as an investigative journalist.
The First Amendment shouldn’t be used as cover for groups to use fraud to advance their political agenda.
And when it comes to slaughtering animals, it should go without saying that PETA’s expertise comes from having blood on its hands. According to Virginia state records, PETA’s animal shelter in Norfolk killed 2,130 dogs, cats and other companion animals last year, making it one of the most lethal privately run shelters in the commonwealth.
The justices should take up the case, PETA v. N.C. Farm Bureau Federation, so it can revoke the activist groups’ license to spy.
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