Orrick initially issued an emergency restraining order on Friday prohibiting the center from releasing recordings, names, addresses or dates gathered at the meetings.
Following a brief hearing on Monday, the judge agreed to keep the temporary order in place until an Aug. 27 hearing on the federation's request for an injunction that would disallow the release of the information for the remainder of the trial. Read Orrick's order below.
The nondisclosure agreements that Center for Medical Progress agents signed while presenting themselves as legitimate conference participants weighed heavily in his decision, Orrick said.
"As far as I'm concerned, anything that happened during the time of the NAF annual meetings, whether it's in the hallway, in a restaurant, in the meeting hall itself, if it's with NAF participants the defendants wouldn't have had access to but for the agreements signed under false pretenses, I think all of that would be included" in the restraining order, he said.
Brian Chavez-Ochoa, the lawyer representing the Center for Medical Progress, said after the hearing that the group would abide by the order. Chavez-Ochoa said the blocked materials represent "a small percentage" of the information the Irvine, California-based organization has secretly gathered on abortion providers, and that it will release additional videos not subject to the order.
"The information they obtained from NAF and the people they spoke with really is of a limited nature to the investigation as a whole," he said.
He argued in court that a federal response to the videos would likely result in a subpoena for the center's unreleased material.
"There is at least one Senate committee that wishes to obtain videos and documents from our clients," Chavez-Ochoa said. He added that the attorney general of Texas and "several other attorney generals in other states are looking at this as we speak. As of right now, no agency that I'm aware of has issued a subpoena, although we believe they're forthcoming."
National Abortion Federation President Vicki Saporta said after the hearing that the nondisclosure agreements are part of the effort her organization makes to protect the privacy and safety of conference participants, many of whom now feel violated and at risk.
"If they can't feel safe and secure at an NAF meeting, where can they feel safe and secure?" Saporta asked.
"Nothing is more important than the safety and security of our members and taking these criminals to task for their illegal activities," the federation's statement says.
The National Abortion Federation has sued the Center for Medical Progress and its officers, claiming conspiracy, fraud, racketeering, misrepresentation and trespassing over what it alleges was an elaborate scheme to discredit and endanger federation members.
"They don't have a constitutional privilege to do what they did," NAF's attorney Derek Foran said after the hearing. "They can be held accountable in the court of law, and they will be held accountable in the court of law."
The lawsuit filed Friday claims that the center's officers, along with hired actors, gained entry to the professional conferences attended by hundreds of doctors, counselors, abortion rights activists and clinic administrators by creating a phony tissue procurement company called Biomax Procurement Services.
David Daleiden, a leader of the Center for Medical Progress who is also named in the suit, said last week that Planned Parenthood and its allies were trying to silence the group and suppress investigative journalism.
"The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work and will contest all attempts from Planned Parenthood and their allies to silence our First Amendment rights," he said in a statement.
Chavez-Ochoa said barring the release of the videos raises prior restraint issues for his clients.
"You have to look at not only the right of speech, but also the right of the press," he said. "That's one of the issues I think is going to be ferreted out here: If you have an investigative reporter engaging in an undercover investigation, what parameters and protections he's afforded by the First Amendment."
Foran laughed at the center's self-characterization as investigative journalists.
"Journalists are supposed to seek truth and report it," he said. "These people are creating a false reality in order to smear people."
The center has released several undercover videos of Planned Parenthood doctors that have riled anti-abortion activists, including one of a doctor in Colorado discussing the prices of aborted fetal remains and another of the group's medical director describing techniques for obtaining fetal body parts for research.
For its part, the center describes itself as "a group of citizen journalists ... concerned about contemporary bioethical issues that impact human dignity, and we oppose any interventions, procedures, and experiments that exploit the unequal legal status of any class of human beings."
A Los Angeles judge last week issued a separate temporary restraining order blocking the center from releasing any video of leaders of StemExpress, a California company that provides fetal tissue to researchers.
This post contains reporting from the Associated Press.
