> The measure passed Idaho’s Senate earlier in February to the applause of agricultural representatives who said it would help ensure farmers’ right to privacy.

There is a certain irony in the US that everyone can get privacy, except private citizen.

I find it fascinating how everytime someone makes scandalous practices public, people come on the scene to condemn the people who go to the public.

If there is no legal way to publicise abhorrent practices, we must break the law. Especially if "breaking the law" is something as harmless as lying on a resume.

Then later on, we may also have to make sure that the person visiting a farm also cannot hear, or smell, or touch, or taste. When you set foot on my property, any data you collect is not admissible in court.

This could be a good thing. I want to make it illegal for people to collect any kind of data of what I do on my property. If you want to come see, then you'll have to talk to my secretary and pay a million dollars for an exclusive interview.

Become rich; purchase laws like this one from politicians. Your dream is reality!

I disagree.

It's in the public's interest to expose this abuse, because the activity is inhumane, immoral, and likely illegal.

It's not uncommon for journalists to go undercover to uncover the truth.

EDIT: I've massively changed my comment because, after thinking this through a bit, the real problem here is that this is a political stunt masquerading as some kind of news story.

Husband beats wife, it's a crime. He should be punished. Neighbor sneaks into house, taping husband beating wife, then publishes it online as part of taking apart husband's run at mayor, it's still a crime, but it's also a political stunt. The two are not mutually exclusive.

So my response here is complex: bad workers get trained, dairy industry gets punished, activists get supported for First Amendment rights to publish -- then punished for invading private property and fraud. It's definitely a mixed bag, and not the good-guy-versus-bad-guy story AJ seems to want to make it out to be.

And yes, there's no doubt the state legislature is protecting the dairy industry, but if this surprises you, you haven't taken a close look at the regulatory state we've been happily creating over the past 50 years. Most politicians would argue, either on or off the record, that this is exactly the kind of thing they get elected to do. This is their job.

  Husband beats wife, it's a crime. He should be
  punished. Neighbor sneaks into house, taping
  husband beating wife, then publishes it online
  as part of taking apart husband's run at mayor,
  it's still a crime, but it's also a political
  stunt. The two are not mutually exclusive.

  Husband is never charged. Crimes are swept under
  the rug. Husband lobbies for a law that
  specifically makes it an extra crime to film
  husbands beating their wifes due to 'invasion of
  privacy.'

  Husband beats wife, it's a crime. He should be
  punished. Concerned 3rd party gets hired on as a
  day laborer, cutting said husband's grass. Films
  husband beating wife through window (for the
  sake of argument, let's say that it's impossible
  to see the windows from public land -- e.g. a
  20-acre estate).

I get that it sucks for someone to be acting in bad faith toward their employer, but isn't that justified and even necessary when the employer is acting in bad faith toward the populace? Obviously this is what Snowden did - he knew what he was doing, he didn't just stumble upon a pile of documents. But maybe you would describe what he did as sketchy, criminal, and wrong? Many have, of course.

Edit: Well you heavily edited your comment while I wrote mine. But, I don't think the wife-beating analogy is valid, it brings in ulterior motives. In this situation there is no mayoral campaign to derail, they actually just wanted to expose the crimes because those are what they took issue with. Still don't understand your desire to demonize the whistleblower.

Here, all sorts of things could happen to bring crimes to light. A worker might rat out his employer. A news crew could be filming some other story. A civil suit might involve disclosure of practices. The FDA might investigate the farm as part of some food chain issue.

After all, we've created a seriously complex system of laws and enforcement to handle stuff like this. Are we now saying that they aren't good enough? If not, why not fix them, instead of having people sneak around other people's property? And let's not forget, if you let the special group called "people who care about animal treatment" violate property rights, then you'll be doing it for everybody, including people you don't agree with, like perhaps "people who don't want abortions happening"

Nope, there are tons of ways to catch this crime and punish the criminals. Let's use them and enough with the self-promotional I'm-upset-so-I-have-a-right-to-break-the-rules bullshit. No amount of drama here is going to change my mind about the firm necessity of respecting private property in the abstract (meaning assuming there isn't more to the story.)

This is just naive. In the places where this happens, such 'ratting out' would incur social penalties from the (local) community. It's better to sweep possibly illegal acts under the rug when the livelihood of the community is (possibly) at stake.

Take Snowden as an example (since it's already on the table). How many people had access to the same information about what the NSA was doing for years, and said nothing? Do you really want the only recourse to be waiting for insiders to come forward?

That said, do we really need more laws here? If "lying on your resume to investigate wrong-doings" is such a generically bad thing, then why is this legislation limited to a specific industry?

> "people who don't want abortions happening"

This is a poor example. What could they possibly exposed to shock the public? That abortions are happening? The whole point of going undercover and releasing footage is to expose something to the public. I'm curious what crimes and/or reprehensible behavior is going on at abortion clinics? Doctors sexually abusing patients? Doctors taking aborted fetuses into a backroom and eating them? I'd argue that if said things were actually happening, it would still be in the public interested even if it was an anti-abortion group that was doing it.

> The FDA might investigate the farm as part of some food chain issue.

Many people believe the government is in the pocket of said industries. It takes a really severe issue (e.g. Mad Cow Disease) to have any significant impact. Just witness how the industry was able to get its own law passed to make it specifically illegal to try and exposed illegal acts behind (their) closed doors. Do you really think that government oversight will work correctly in such an environment?

And yeah, there is a fine line between "exposing wrongdoing" and "interfering with legal business operations," and an activist might not always know which side they will fall on, but I would prefer to live in a country where they have some liberty to act on their beliefs.

Take 100K. Hire private investigators to find people who work at the place in question and who are not happy. Pay these people for affidavits stating that animal cruelty goes on. Based on that sworn testimony, go to a federal prosecutor and get a warrant. Take the warrant and gather evidence. Or, start a civil action and begin discovery.

This kind of thing is done all the time. But you know what it lacks? Publicity. Because at the end of the day, that's what activists want. It's not necessarily to stop the wrong, it's to get TV and internet coverage -- just like we see here -- and to use that coverage to raise money, gain attention, create an even bigger movement.

So yeah, I'm all for activists speaking out. Hell, I'll go march with them. But not onto somebody else's private property. They can go jump in a lake as far as I care, no matter what kind of impassioned cause they're thumping their chests about this week.

Look, either civilization depends on the rule of law or we all get to make impassioned speeches about things and do what we want because we believe our beliefs to be so special (more than other people). Count me in as a "rule of law" guy. Otherwise neither you or I are going to like things very much.

>Take 100K.

Are you serious?

    > You're effectively using the trust given to you from somebody to make a political propaganda video damaging their interests.

But how is that different from a journalist making the same thing?

If it was false or showing the farmer having sex with his/her wife/husband/alien living in the attic, it would be understandable to ban it[0], but showing a number of abuse and the lack of oversight of a large company doesn't strike as particularly reprehensible.

[0] Amusingly, these kind of things are NOT banned. Cue all the leaked sextapes of celebrities and those websites by Hunter Moore.

If the problem is as widespread as the article seems to imply, then I think the industry should be more proactive and formally implement measures (such as allowing third-party but sanctioned "undercover" inspectors) to identify and address these abuses.

But the cynic in me already suspects why the industry would never go for something like this voluntarily.

For example near where I live there is a "slaughterhouse" that use the same techniques as other similar slaughterhouses but the one near me gets a lot of press and outrage.

The slaughterhouse I refer to is open to the outside it's on ice and it's seals not cow, bulls, pigs or chickens but it's the same process a bash on the head and then chop up the carcass. It just seems worse due to red blood on white ice and being out in the open not in a building.

The balance of the good seems clear to me.

FWIW however, I am a big proponent of exposing animal cruelty.

Indeed, what do animal rights groups feel on this? No law is going to stop me from treating fellow humans with respect, and according that same respect to all life forms reliant on Humanity. I would not own slaves regardless of the Law [New England blood, we don't do that shit]. I would not litter if it was mandated by ordinance. I will not hate another religion or culture because our Dear Leader says they are evil.

I know Idaho was a late adopter to the tort, while many other states committed the tort to statute. They may just be coming around.

The best argument for harmonizing it with first amendment law is in a Yale Law Journal note from 1973:

> [F]ree speech is protected not for some intrinsic value of speech but because it is a necessary condition for the making of informed decisions about matters of government, decisions which all citizens in a democracy are called on to make....He who performs his listening and deciding functions in a glass house is coerced by public opinion, whether anyone is actually looking in or not. If every magazine he reads, every rally he attends, every person he speaks to might somehow become a matter of public knowledge, he would feel inhibiting pressure.

David B. Roe, "Privacy in the First Amendment," 82 Yale L.J. 1462.

That said, some facts aren't merely private matters. If leading public figures are violating the law or lying to constituents or abusing their family, the public has a right to know.

Farmers abusing animals is at least slightly harder, because whether or not that's a matter of public concern hinges on the conclusions we've made about animal rights. If we live in a world where animals are robotic automatons deserving of no relevant moral consideration, then these are probably private, embarassing facts that don't bear any exposure. If we live in a world where the pain and suffering of animals is valued very near as to the pain and suffering of humans, ie, heeding Peter Singer's allegations of "speciesism," then these are absolutely 100% public facts.

We don't live in either of those worlds though. We live in this messy, complicated, in between world where we are still trying to figure out where animal rights rank between those two extremes.

Probably the best argument that these are public facts would note that outlining the actual practices under consideration (ie, literal animal rape and torture) help us determine which part of that spectrum we're in, because it helps animal rights activists note that their depictions are not absurd hypotheticals.

Probably the best argument on the other side is a claim that footage is cherry picked out of a much larger sample, that this activity happens exceedingly rarely, and the footage is closer to malicious slander or misrepresentation. (Not sure if that's true, but if it is, it would be a relevant consideration.)

Similar, perhaps, but torts entitle someone to sue for damages and this law creates a new crime for which people can be imprisoned. It also removes the opportunity to argue on a case-by-case basis whether the facts disclosed were, in fact a matter of public interest.

If covert films document violations of the law regarding animal cruelty or food safety, those are matters of public interest by default. This law differs from the tort of public disclosure of private facts in that it still applies when those facts are of legitimate public interest. I doubt it will hold up to a serious constitutional challenge for that reason.

I should have written, "The considerations underlying this law may be similar to a very different common law tort"... which don't help us predict outcomes in individual cases, might just shed some light on how, if it did survive any First Amendment challenge, how that would happen.

In practice there are enormous differences. And even the First Amendment challenge would be complicated by this being a criminal statute and not having an out for the public interest.

I'm less sure about the effect of criminalizing the collection of information instead of its dissemination. I'm more unsure whether animal cruelty is public interest by default, just don't know the animal rights cases. But, eh, Ninth Circuit, you're probably right, Idaho may have a tough shot.

Living in a country that went through bovine spongiform encephalopathy and a variety of other animal diseases I think it's a frightening idea to prevent secret filming.

People who want to film secretly will try to do so using legal means as far as possible. They'll get ployed as a worker on the farm, for example. But if secret filming is itself banned those people will turn to entirely criminal methods - breaking and entering. This means that secret filming moves from moderate groups to hardline activist groups.

That is sub-optimal.

And why are farmers scared of their animal conditions being shown? People should be aware of how their food is produced. See "kill it, cook it, eat it" as an example tv series.

I just want to say though that wrt

> ...are violating the law...the public has a right to know.

There may not be a legal obligation for the public to know, if no violation of the law has occurred, however just because something isn't illegal, does not make it right (abusing animals)

I know that reasoning does not hold from a legal standpoint, but without standing up to unjust laws, the civil rights movement, or marriage equality, and even gender equality would have been severely hampered.

But even that's imprecise, some violations of law by public individuals might not even qualify as warranting public scrutiny (a speeding record 20 years ago?), whereas some legal activities by private individuals might warrant public scrutiny and get dropped from this sort of tort, it's very case by case.

Aren't there Federal statutes that lay out what animal abuse is? I know the Law views animals as property, but in regards to dogs,cats, etc. there are rules about how you treat them. Do bovine, equine, and poultry animals not fall under these protections?

Obviously i could be completely off base...

Cf. http://awic.nal.usda.gov/farm-animals

> That said, some facts aren't merely private matters. If leading public figures are violating the law or lying to constituents or abusing their family, the public has a right to know.

Is the "Public right to know" a high bar to pass? Would the footage be legal if for example, the farmer has said its meat was "100% without animal cruelty" or if animal cruelty was detrimental to the meat?

Oh, big warning. I'm using a general common law tort to interpret a new criminal statute, but only to talk about social fairness involved in policies in a really generic, high level way. Much of my analysis won't apply at all to violations of this statute. You've hit on exactly one such area.

I don't know the extent of any "public right to know" exception to this law... I was really just laying out the social considerations at play on both sides when considering a law like this. That was probably really confusing.

If you're talking about the tort, the strength of that bar is probably highly dependent upon your jurisdiction or even your judge. No idea.

EDIT: The lack of a provision to allow publicly relevant facts, however the legislature defines those, may hurt the law's chances under first amendment analysis, as Zak points out. May bump any review up to something called "strict scrutiny" (which in practice almost always means the law fails). Criminalizing the "collection" of information instead of its release may inoculate the law from some challenges, but I'd still like to read more privacy case law before making a call on that (that's probably the single biggest question here, I'd love pointers here from anyone who has done more privacy research.)

I said someone throwing you out of their house because of something you said was not a First Amendment issue, and it's not. I don't recall saying, or implying that a homeowner has the ability to jail someone or impose fines. If you are aware of that being the case, I'd certainly be interested in citations.

The main issue is that often a farm isn't merely some small farmers property. It's the place where big agra policies are being enacted.

Few people would be outraged if someone smuggled a camera into a big factory to document abuses. Be skeptical of privacy arguments here. This is the equivalent of a big manufacturer contracting out to small sweatshops.

I also know the guy who owns the dairy the film was taken on, and I know quite a few of the people performing the most ageegious acts were fired soon after it was published.

But, as an issue, the film was just published, in the most sensational way they could, and NO effort was made to contact the dairyman ahead of time. The point of making the film was not help, but to hurt, permanently.

The film that was produced, is being used against all areas of the milk industry. The people using it add words to the effect of "this is how all dairies treat their cows". I've already seen it used in campaigns against yogurt and cheese producers.

Also, the debate continues over here about the law. Some dairymen are campaigning to reverse the law and open things up completely. But a big issue is education, too many people in America have never really touched a cow, and think people treat them like a cat.

I also don't understand why the publisher should have contacted the dairyman beforehand. What purpose would that serve if the video would eventually be published anyway?

People care about where their food comes from now a days, and you're right that the public is ignorant of dairy techniques. However, you can't complain about the public's ignorance of dairy farming while at the same time decrying a publisher for making a move about dairy techniques. Censorship is not an effective means of education. If the dairymen want the public to be better educated then they should open their farms up, or start making their own movies detailing how they raise cows.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/aug/05/google-...

We need to wait for a proper first amendment challenge to this before assuming this law will hold up in court. There is a lot about this law that could be challenged on first amendment grounds.

1) I don't believe animal cruelty is okay. 2) If someone is abusing an animal, they should be prosecuted by the law 3) I find that many people have no idea the conditions or actions that are required to raise large animals. Some practices may seem cruel to the unknowing bystander, but are, in fact, practices to help maintain the health of the animals, the safety of the workers who manage them, and provide a product that we, the consumer, will enjoy.

As for this bill, I believe that it shows a serious flaw in the way we raise and produce food in the United States. The demand for low prices have resulted in an attempted mass production of animals.

This bill does make it appear that these farmers are guilty of something wrong, and they're trying to hide it. That may or may not be the case. I do know that if they are doing something wrong, there are legal avenues in place to investigate and prosecute the wrong doers.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-cow-abuse-v...

What are you talking about? I explicitly said the description is too vague to make meaningful conclusions about.

It's not that hard to look it up anyway: http://www.peta.org/videos/sexual-deviance-and-sexual-abuse-...

(don't watch it)

You do know that cows are forcefully inseminated and impregnated (i.e. raped) in order to keep up the production, right?

[I'm not sure why the downvotes are in place just because I'm mentioning a well known fact about how the dairy industry works]

Edit: Also when you call it 'rape' and 'sexual' I wonder how you would feel about impregnation that completely bypassed genitalia and went though an incision in the abdomen. Assume getting a c-section too if you like.

Do you have a problem with human infants receiving painful vaccinations for which they likewise cannot possibly consent?

I'm not seeing the mental leap here. A cow making it obvious that she is ready to mate is equivalent to a woman making it obvious she does not want to mate? Consent implies agreement before the act; an orgasm during the act would not apply.

I'm not even sure if a cow indicating desire to mate implies consent, but that is why I asked the parent's opinion. I'd tend to agree with you that consent and animals do not even mix, but the parent clearly disagrees: Rape isn't even a concept without being able to apply the idea of consent.

> Also, looks like you have quite a naive picture of how insemination actually works.

What gives you that impression? I've spent the majority of my life around dairy cattle and am very familiar with the processes (which may or may not include the use of a bull). I was trying to simplify the argument so that we could have a meaningful conversation without having to nitpick over irrelevant details.

i.e., You know, America's health-care is just FINE, compared to Ethiopia's.

This law is terrible, no matter what you compare it to.

Why is the gov. banning filming? What's in it for the gov.?

The other side will say that bad publicity for their dairy industry will hurt the state's economy and cost jobs and tax revenue.

Live by the sword, die by the sword...

This sounds extreme, but I've about had it with such people who want to "have their cake and eat it, too". If you are an ethical, well-run business, your own employees communication as well as your interface with the public keep you honest and efficient.

If you play a part in insisting that all this be "swept under the rug", then you should de facto play a part in paying the consequences. Whether or not you were individually, directly involved.

I bet you that Idaho law would still allow filming if you suspected terrorism inside the farm lol

If it is considered wrong/unethical to film on private property in Idaho - why would they legislate for a specific industry? Shouldn't filming video on private property be illegal all across the board in Idaho if the problem is about basic rights?

From your description, it seems like there is no "breaking and entering" to prove. Trespassing, falsified resumés etc., but there are already laws for that, and the laws themselves don't make it easier or harder to trespass.

And that there is no 'breaking and entering' was actually my point. Farms are not houses; yet still private.

This is like legislating to make URL modification illegal 'hacking' and justifying it by saying programmers are too expensive.

If our society wants people to have stronger protection for large unsecured areas, they it should apply to all such areas.

Correct, it is an inherently non-private location, and therefore not entitled to any "privacy".

Anyone can put under surveillance anything visible from anywhere they're allowed to be. Kids, cats, and cops alike, no permission, no warrants, nothing.

This logic would permit egregious abuse to go on unchallenged behind closed doors because its private property. This cannot honestly be what you are saying?

There is a balance between the laws that might be broken in order to discover a crime. If someone commits a crime with the intention to discover another crime, you seem to feel it is acceptable to ignore the second crime?

It's actually not okay to create precedent that penalizes people that discover your crime, it only makes crimes easier to hide.

If you run an operation like this and someone blows a whistle, they should be legally protected, not prosecuted.

I wonder how Google/Facebook/Microsoft would react if people started posting videos of people writing bad code while on the job?

2. Trespassing here could uncover more serious crimes that are happening.

3. Somebody lobbied a bunch of politicians to make trespassing a very serious offense to deter people from uncovering a more serious crime.

Part 3 is the thuggery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuggee

A band of organized criminals.

and a food-production facility too? subject to USDA inspections and a whole set of regulations, being that what comes out of it has direct impact on public health?

Certainly there should be provisions to protect the privacy of the people living there, as there should be ways to ensure that also the public good is served and protected.

Your farm is not a house, it is a farm. A house that might happen to sit on the same land parcel is of absolutely no interest to anyone. Your private life simply is not that interesting.

Your commercial operations, which occur outside the house, are an entirely different matter.

Instead, you're so deathly afraid of it that you think you need to apply something even stronger than the extraordinary privacy protections afforded to homes to your place of employment by criminally punishing your employees for gathering evidence of your wrongdoing.

That is an insane leap unknown to the American legal tradition. You simply do not have a legitimate interest in preventing lawfully-present individuals from reporting your illegal activities.