California tries to criminalize journalism — again

A bill moving through the California Legislature would give taxpayer-funded organizations the power to demand the removal of videos recorded in public spaces — and impose steep financial penalties on anyone who publishes them.

AB 2624, sponsored by Assemblywoman Mia Bonta (D-Oakland), is framed as protection for immigrant service providers against harassment and threats. The framing makes opposition look cruel.

Bills that need moral immunity to pass tend to deserve the scrutiny they’re trying to avoid.

The bill extends confidentiality and anti-doxxing protections to “immigration support services providers,” grafting those provisions onto laws originally written for narrowly defined, high-risk medical contexts.

The expansion sounds measured. What it creates is a broad, vaguely-bounded shield available to any organization that can plausibly claim to serve immigrants, including outfits receiving public money.

Under AB 2624, those organizations could invoke legal protections to force the removal of footage, backed by the financial threat of penalties against the person who filmed or published it. That mechanism doesn’t distinguish between stalkers and a citizen journalists.

The bill’s critics have taken to calling it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act.” Shirley is a 24-year-old YouTuber from Utah widely credited with exposing fraud in day care facilities in Minnesota. He has spent the past several months filming California hospice offices, day cares, and government-funded facilities he alleges are likewise billing for patients who don’t exist.

Shirley’s videos have attracted tens of millions of views and congressional attention. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office has responded to Shirley by depicting him as a predator lurking outside a day care. That’s not an investigation or rebuttal, but a smear.

If Shirley’s footage was fiction, that’s a strange amount of effort to discredit the cinematographer rather than disprove the allegations.

Sacramento’s position, apparently, is that the best answer to allegations of nine-figure fraud is to ridicule the person holding the camera, and then legislate the camera away.

The danger in this legislation lies in the word “intent.” Publishing images or information connected to alleged misconduct could be construed as harassment if it risks provoking backlash against the subjects.

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Selective enforcement becomes available. Independent journalists, activists, or private citizens documenting publicly observable activity could face penalties — not for inciting violence, but for publishing findings that embarrass the wrong people.

California has been here before. In 2015, anti-abortion activist David Daleiden released undercover videos showing Planned Parenthood executives discussing fees for fetal tissue, allegedly unlawfully.

California’s response was to prosecute Daleiden. He became the first journalist ever criminally prosecuted under the state’s recording law. Then-Attorney General Kamala Harris inherited the investigation and allowed it to continue. The state raided Daleiden’s apartment in April 2016, seizing laptops, hard drives, and hundreds of hours of undercover footage, while never investigating Planned Parenthood for the alleged trafficking claims.

The prosecution dragged through the courts for a decade. The final charge was dismissed and the case expunged earlier this month. What California demonstrated in the Daleiden case was a willingness to use recording laws as a political instrument — targeting the messenger, while leaving the alleged violator alone.

AB 2624 would encode that political instinct into law.

AB 2624 builds a legal framework in which exposure itself becomes the offense.

The bill’s stated purpose is protection. Its practical function is leverage, available to publicly-funded organizations that would prefer their operations remain unexamined.

Its most insidious feature requires no enforcement at all. Make accountability expensive enough, and most people will decide it isn’t worth it.

California has an expansive fraud problem, a governor who meets it with mockery, and a legislature now building the legal tools to ensure the next Nick Shirley thinks twice before pointing a camera at an alleged ghost hospice in Van Nuys.

John Mac Ghlionn is an essayist and commentator who covers politics and culture.