“If large numbers of organizations embrace sting attacks, our | James O'Keefe

“If large numbers of organizations embrace sting attacks, our social fabric and sense of community will fade, and our country will be worse off for the practice.” …. Here is my response to that:

At the heart of this issue is something deeper than recording human interaction. That something predates modern technology and is as old as human interaction itself—social trust issues. Individuals discriminate as to whom they choose to trust. There is no formal duty to keep confidential what someone voluntarily shares. False friends, moles, and spies have a well-documented existence—“Et tu, Brute?”— long before the advent of recording devices. Prior to electronic recording, conversations could be transcribed or jotted down in the reporter’s notebook or even recollected after the fact. A California count acknowledged in a 1968 case against Time magazine that the “successful practice” of investigative reporting] “long antecedes the invention of miniature cameras and electronic devices.”

The risk of betrayal and exposure—a trust risk—has not choked off all social exchange. Rather, from time immemorial individuals gauged relationship strength before deciding whether and how much information to disclose to another. In most such cases, it is against one’s own self-interest to betray the confidence of another. Also, the right to record when one party is present is very closely tied to the right to speak or even to take contemporaneous notes about what one sees and hears. As 60 minutes producer Don Hewitt quipped, “People committing malfeasance don’t have any right to privacy….What are we saying -- that Upton Sinclair shouldn’t have smuggled his pencil in?”