Opinion ID: 784224
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Requirement of a Minimum of Interference

Text: 59 That the Company is both a provider of wire or electronic communication service and an other person within the meaning of § 2518(4), and may therefore be required to furnish facilities and technical assistance is not, however, the end of the story. The question remains whether the order goes too far in interfering with the service provided by the Company, by preventing the Company from supplying the System's services to its customers when a vehicle is under surveillance. We conclude that it does. 60 Court orders granted pursuant to the authority of § 2518 must specify that assistance be provided unobtrusively and with a minimum of interference with the services that such service provider, landlord... or person is according the person whose communications are to be intercepted. § 2518(4) (emphasis added). 23 The a minimum of interference language was added in 1970 as part of the amendment that added the explicit assistance requirement to title III. Pub.L. No. 91-358, § 211(b) (1970). 61 Looking at the language of the statute, the a minimum of interference requirement certainly allows for some level of interference with customers' service in the conducting of surveillance. 24 We need not decide precisely how much interference is permitted. A minimum of interference at least precludes total incapacitation of a service while interception is in progress. Put another way, eavesdropping is not performed with a minimum of interference if a service is completely shut down as a result of the surveillance. 25 62 Our interpretation of the a minimum of interference language is bolstered by our reading of title III, which, we believe, does not evince a congressional intent to authorize surveillance in the face of complete disruption of a wire and electronic communication service for a particular customer. As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. New York Telephone Co., [t]he conviction that private citizens have a duty to provide assistance to law enforcement officials when it is required is by no means foreign to our traditions. 434 U.S. at 175 n. 24, 98 S.Ct. 364. At the same time, the Supreme Court stressed that the order in question in that case (approved under the All Writs Act, not title III) required minimal effort on the part of the Company and no disruption to its operations.  Id. at 175, 98 S.Ct. 364 (emphasis added). The obligation of private citizens to assist law enforcement, even if they are compensated for the immediate costs of doing so, has not extended to circumstances in which there is a complete disruption of a service they offer to a customer as part of their business, and, as we read title III, Congress did not intend that it would. 26 63 In this case, FBI surveillance completely disabled the monitored car's System. The only function that worked in some form was the emergency button or automatic emergency response signal. These emergency features, however, were severely hampered by the surveillance: Pressing the emergency button and activation of the car's airbags, instead of automatically contacting the Company, would simply emit a tone over the already open phone line. No one at the Company was likely to be monitoring the call at such a time, as the call was transferred to the FBI once received. There is no assurance that the FBI would be monitoring the call at the time the tone was transmitted; indeed, the minimization requirements, see note 23, supra, preclude the FBI from listening in to conversations unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance. Also, the FBI, however well-intentioned, is not in the business of providing emergency road services, and might well have better things to do when listening in than respond with such services to the electronic signal sent over the line. The result was that the Company could no longer supply any of the various services it had promised its customer, including assurance of response in an emergency. 64 We hold that whatever the precise limits Congress intended with its a minimum of interference limitation, the level of interference with the System worked by the FBI's surveillance is not a minimum of interference with the services that the Company accord[s] the person whose communications are to be intercepted. § 2518(4). Because, given the set-up of the System, the surveillance could not be completed with a minimum of interference, the district court erred in ordering the Company's assistance. 27