How is it ever legal to break into a business's property and secretly video the operations? You surely can't sneak into a factory and record their processes to sell to China. Is it only allowed when it's being used for protesting, not for stealing IP? Or only on farms but not in factories? What about trespass law? Non-disclosure agreements for employees? Are those invalid?
It isn't. Ag-gag laws extend the scope of, or punishment for, trespass with intent to record video of agricultural operations. That is what the courts have found to violate free speech and equal protection.
It is as if states enacted laws against graffiti bearing a particular political or religious message, with either a greater punishment, or broader definition of "graffiti", than existing graffiti laws. Yes, graffiti is already illegal; yet these laws clearly violate free speech and equal protection, since the punishment is different based on what message you are trying to convey with the graffiti.
FTA, it sounds like this law was too vague and was being leveraged to go after people, recording from "a public street."
>The Utah case, filed by animal-rights groups, was the first lawsuit in the U.S. to challenge one of the ag-gag laws. It came after a woman was charged in 2013 when she filmed a front-end loader dumping a sick cow outside a suburban Salt Lake City slaughterhouse. The case was dismissed because she was standing on a public street when she made the recording.
Presumably this just means that the filming isn't illegal; it doesn't mean actions taken to film are no longer subject to statutes. You can still be charged with trespassing, just not trespassing + filming.
>In short, the cases cited by the State answer the question of whether a landowner can remove someone from her property or sue for trespass even when the person wishes to exercise First Amendment rights. And generally, as the cases make clear, the answer is yes. But that is not the question before the court. The question here is whether the State (not a private landowner) can prosecute (not sue for damages) a person based on her speech on private property. [...]
> In sum, the fact that speech occurs on a private agricultural facility does not render it outside First Amendment protection. Nobody disputes that owners of an agricultural facility can immediately remove from the property any person speaking in ways the owners find objectionable. But if the State wants to criminalize the same speech, it must justify the law under the First Amendment.
Legality and the morality of the times may be different species, but speaking only on the latter, would you say the same thing about people who do undercover investigations in other areas (like sweat shops, child labor and many other things that most people would agree as unethical)? Shouldn't it be the law that should catch up?
