This primarily concerned individuals. Two people couldn’t meet and secretly record a conversation with the other without consent. Recording a private conversation you are personally involved in, without notification, is legal in almost all states.
> In most cases, it is not legal to record audio on security cameras unless all parties are aware that you may be recording audio. https://www.upcounsel.com/audio-surveillance-laws-by-state
Notably most video cameras don't include audio. Because it's a legal liability & it's simply easier to prove your camera cant record audio than to have a feature that's disabled. Audio recording is incredibly un-popular. But yes, still, in quite a number of states it's possible to go around putting audio recordings in public. 0 party consent in public.
But even that's not what Veritas did at all. They went into private offices of other people & secretly recorded conservations. People being asked questions thought they were dealing with crazy people & were afraid for their safety, they have testified. Giles dressed as a prostitute & O'Keefe semi-claimed to be a boyfriend, and walked into offices in 7 states (and DC) and pressured staff into talking about illegal businesses. They did as much as they could to, while secretly recording, get people to say bad things. One person being attacked like swore under oath that they feared for their safety & were scared. One said they thought it was a joke. One of them played along, feeling sorry for Giles who said she was being injured by her pimp, and then called the police because she was propositioned about setting up under-age sex trade operations. This farce brought down one of the biggest international collectivist organization on the planet, by ambushing these people with secret recordings & cherry picking the worst things to hurt them with.
This whole case is about people recording each other in private. That's the whole purpose of this law: to defend against assault by advanced persistent Vertias like aggressor threats (and lower/simpler forms of scummery).
While ACORN was a heavily Democratic organization, it wasn't a party front like so many nonprofits have become. Democrats that didn't do anything for people had trouble with ACORN, and they were glad to get rid of them. Democratic congresspeople eventually joined in, and their outlets ran cover for them destroying a grassroots community organization. Definitely one of the largest in the country of that type, if not in the history of the modern US.
Blaming it on O'Keefe is easy. I wish Democrats would stop using their failures as explicit justifications for limitations on civil liberties.
Given what a sensationalistic heavily spun story the other side of the media was rolling with, it is a bit hard to imagine who is going to step up & grab the third rail to make a case here. The whole story starts & ends with selectively chosen soundbites being used to wreck & ruin a name, and signing up to be the next target in this kind of a sniper war is terrifying; even if you can form ranks it's unclear that your constituents won't see only the worst-most spun forms of your defense. It's a problem with democracy in general that nuance & perspective don't convey nearly as well, are much harder cases to build than attention grabbing soundbites.
I can definitely appreciate the value of 1 part federal consent laws, as enabling folks to help bring to light the bad in this world. Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant & all that. That this was such murky shit doesn't really change that basis. Still, it's quite disappointing to see what seems, to me, like such an off-base & illegitimate Federal ruling used to so broadly undermine State legislature. Using the fact that this law allowed recording of the police & felonies endangering human life as the sole basis - because that's discriminatory - to say it's unfair & entirely has to be ended seems absurd.
They did cause the national US ACORN organization to be dissolved [0], but individual US state orgs (CA, NY etc.) continue [1], new organizations such as the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, and non-US orgs continue unaffected.
I don't even know that ACORN was the "biggest international collectivist organization on the planet", certainly not one very cohesive organization.
As to "This whole case is about people recording each other in private", it's not about mere random invasion of privacy or prurience, O'Keefe/Veritas did try to claim a public-interest journalistic defense.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_O'Keefe
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ACORN_in_the_United...
This is somewhat off topic but does any of this apply to sign language? Is there a lesser expectation of privacy since "anyone" can see it, so it's treated like a video recording? Is there any conflict with disability laws?
But as for how this incident was landed / portrayed, what a spectacle it made at the time: Rachel Maddow's coverage is short & shows how it was bandihooed across Fox News. This was like a major spectacle in right-wing American media for a considerably long time, and it's hard to underemphasize how heavily Fox & others worked with O'Keefe to sell this manufactured story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0B0wxt3XYc
I do want to point out, we never got most of the footage. There are many many hours, perhaps even days of footage & audio O'Keefe & Giles recorded doing this sort of stuff, trying to cause trouble. They spent an enormous amount of time trying to generate soundbytes. Also notably, never once was anyone of any supervisor or leadership position taken by these bits; all the juicy sound-bytes O'Keefe got were from pretty low level employees, of an organization with over 1200 neighborhood chapters in the US.
Aren’t most states single-party consent? I know mine is, for which I’m grateful. I regularly record “private conversations” with state officials after having had incidents with them.
California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington.
15 states. Everyone else is single-party consent.
> Where consent by all parties is needed pursuant to this chapter, consent shall be considered obtained whenever one party has announced to all other parties engaged in the communication or conversation, in any reasonably effective manner, that such communication or conversation is about to be recorded or transmitted