Opinion ID: 176129
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Whether Alternative Remedies are Adequate

Text: Despite the SEC's argument to the contrary, the privacy interests harmed by the disclosure order here could not be adequately remedied on final appeal. In Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514, 121 S.Ct. 1753, 149 L.Ed.2d 787 (2001), the Supreme Court noted that the disclosure of the contents of a private conversation can be an even greater intrusion on privacy than the interception itself. As a result, there is a valid independent justification for prohibiting such disclosures by persons who lawfully obtained access to the contents of an illegally intercepted message, even if that prohibition does not play a significant role in preventing such interceptions from occurring in the first place. Id. at 533, 121 S.Ct. 1753 (emphasis added). Similarly, in Gelbard v. United States, 408 U.S. 41, 92 S.Ct. 2357, 33 L.Ed.2d 179 (1972), the Court noted that [c]ontrary to the Government's assertion that the invasion of privacy is over and done with, to compel the testimony of [ ] witnesses compounds the statutorily proscribed invasion of their privacy by adding to the injury of the interception the insult of compelled disclosure. Id. at 51-52, 92 S.Ct. 2357. In short, there is a distinct privacy right against the disclosure of wiretapped private communications that is separate and apart from the privacy right against the interception of such communications. Because suppressing illegally intercepted evidence, or finding the discovery order erroneous on appeal of a final judgment, would not remedy the harm done to the right against disclosure, we find that, at least in the context of the instant case, the right to prevent unauthorized disclosure of intercepted communications could not be adequately vindicated on final appeal. As in City of New York, any sensitive information contained in the [recordings] will, upon final judgment, already have been exposed. 607 F.3d at 934 (finding appeal from final judgment inadequate to review disclosure of police reports) (internal quotation marks omitted). The tapes will have been listened to, and the privacy rights of the parties to the conversations will forever have been harmed by the very act of exposure. In the instant case, the harm to this interest is compounded by the fact that the ordered disclosure affects the rights of numerous innocent parties, who will have even their irrelevant conversations disclosed to the SEC and other parties, whose constitutional and statutory rights may already have been violated should the wiretaps prove to have been illegal, and who will have no means of vindicating their privacy rights in any final appeal. The SEC's heavy reliance on United States v. Miller, 14 F.3d 761 (2d Cir.1994), for the proposition that an order disclosing wiretap evidence can be adequately remedied on direct appeal is misplaced. In Miller, we did find that final review was adequate to vindicate the privacy rights at issue in certain defendants' appeal of the denial of motions to prohibit the entry of wiretapped conversations into evidence. In Miller, however, the tapes at issue had already been played at the defendants' public trials after a judicial determination that the interceptions had been lawful. Id. at 764. In addition, of the two defendants involved in Miller, one had already been found guilty and sentenced, and the other had been convicted and awaited sentencing. Id. at 762-63. There was no reason to hear an appeal before sentencing instead of after it. More fundamentally, however, the defendant's right against disclosure was not at issue; illegally obtained or not, the conversations had already been disclosed to the public. See id. at 764 (finding defendants' appeal moot because the tapes ... have already been played at... trial). Indeed, we noted in Miller that because the conversations had been played at trial, the `cat [was] out of the bag' so to speak, and there [was] no way the trial court or this Court [could] put it back in. Id. Unlike Miller, where the only relevant privacy right at issue was the right against unlawful interception, in the instant case the cat is not yet out of the bag, and we must consider both the Appellants' (and others') rights against unlawful interception and their rights against the initial disclosure. Once the cat is out of the bag, the right against disclosure cannot later be vindicated. This finding, of course, does not mean that a writ of mandamus will always be appropriate to remedy an erroneous disclosure order. The other elements of the test for the appropriateness of the writ must still be met. However, given the particular circumstances of this case, where the privacy rights of hundreds of parties are at issue, the legality of the interceptions has not yet been decided, and the disclosure order encompasses both relevant and irrelevant conversations, we find final review would be an inadequate alternative remedy. [7]