A federal appeals court in Oregon on Tuesday upheld a decades-old state law prohibiting most secret recordings of oral conversations, rejecting a First Amendment challenge by undercover journalist group Project Veritas. In a 9–2 decision, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Seattle ruled that Oregon’s conversational privacy statute does not violate Project Veritas’s free speech rights, as the group had argued. “The conversation privacy statute survived intermediate scrutiny as applied to Project Veritas,” U.S. Circuit Judge Morgan Christen wrote for the majority opinion. “Oregon has a significant government interest in ensuring that its residents know when their conversations are recorded, the statute is narrowly tailored to that interest, and the statute leaves open ample alternative channels of communication for Project Veritas to engage in investigative journalism and to communicate its message.”…