Court Opinion

ID: 9427184
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:19:58.908312+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:05.312878
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Brennan,
with whom Mr. Justice Marshall joins,
dissenting.
In 1968, Congress departed from the longstanding national policy forbidding surreptitious interception of wire communications,1 by enactment of Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 18 U. S. C. §§ 2510-2520 (1976 ed.). That Act, for the first time authorizing law enforcement personnel to monitor private telephone conversations, provided strict guidelines and limitations on the use of wiretaps as a barrier to Government infringement of individual privacy. One of the protections thought essential by Congress as a bulwark against unconstitutional governmental intrusion on private conversations is the “minimization requirement” of § 2518 (5). The Court today eviscerates this congressionally mandated protection of individual privacy, marking the third decision in which the Court has disregarded or diluted con-gressionally established safeguards2 designed to prevent Government electronic surveillance from becoming the abhorred *144general warrant which historically had destroyed the cherished expectation of privacy in the home.3
The “minimization provision” of § 2518 (5) provides, inter alia, that every order authorizing interception of wire communications include a requirement that the interception “shall be conducted in such a way as to minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception under this chapter . . . (Emphasis added.) The District Court’s findings of fact, not challenged here or in the Court of Appeals, plainly establish that this requirement was shamelessly violated. The District Court found:
“[T]he monitoring agents made no attempt to comply with the minimization order of the Court but listened to and recorded all calls over the [subject] telephone. They showed no regard for the right of privacy and did nothing to avoid unnecessary intrusion.” App. 36.
The District Court further found that the special agent who conducted the wiretap testified under oath that “he and the agents working under him knew of the minimization requirement but made no attempt to comply therewith.” Id., at 37. The District Court found a “knowing and purposeful failure” to comply with the minimization requirements. Id., at 39. These findings, made on remand after re-examination, reiterated the District Court’s initial finding that “[the agents] did not even attempt 'lip service compliance’ with the provision of the order and statutory mandate but rather completely disregarded it.” 331 F. Supp. 233, 247 (DC 1971). In the face of this clear finding that the agents monitored every call and, moreover, knowingly failed to conduct the wiretap “in such a way as to minimize the interception of communications” not subject to interception, and despite the fact that 60% of all calls intercepted were not subject to intercep*145tion, the Court holds that no violation of § 2518 (5) occurred. The basis for that conclusion is a post hoc reconstruction offered by the Government of what would have been reasonable assumptions on the part of the agents had they attempted to comply with the statute. Since, on the basis of this reconstruction of reality, it would have been reasonable for the agents to assume that each of the calls dialed and received was likely to be in connection with the criminal enterprise, there was no violation, notwithstanding the fact that the agents intercepted every call with no effort to minimize interception of the noninterceptable calls. That reasoning is thrice flawed.
First, and perhaps most significant, it totally disregards the explicit congressional command that the wiretap be conducted so as to minimize interception of communications not subject to interception. Second, it blinks reality by accepting, as a substitute for the good-faith exercise of judgment as to which calls should not be intercepted by the agent most familiar with the investigation, the post hoc conjectures of the Government as to how the agent would have acted had he exercised his judgment. Because it is difficult to know with any degree of certainty whether a given communication is subject to interception prior to its interception, there necessarily must be a margin of error permitted. But we do not enforce the basic premise of the Act that intrusions of privacy must be kept to the minimum by excusing the failure of the agent to make the good-faith effort to minimize which Congress mandated. In the nature of things it is impossible to know how many fewer interceptions would have occurred had a good-faith judgment been exercised, and it is therefore totally unacceptable to permit the failure to exercise the congressionally imposed duty to be excused by the difficulty in predicting what might have occurred had the duty been exercised. Finally, the Court's holding permits Government agents deliberately to flout the duty imposed upon them by Congress. In a linguistic tour *146de force the Court converts the mandatory language that the interception “shall be conducted” to a precatory suggestion. Nor can the Court justify its disregard of the statute’s language by any demonstration that it is necessary to do so to effectuate Congress’ purpose as expressed in the legislative history. On the contrary, had the Court been faithful to the congressional purpose, it would have discovered in § 2518 (10) (a) and its legislative history the unambiguous congressional purpose to have enforced the several limitations on interception imposed by the statute. Section 2518 (10) (a) requires suppression of evidence intercepted in violation of the statute’s limitations on interception, and the legislative history emphasizes Congress’ intent that the exclusionary remedy serve as a deterrent against the violation of those limitations by law enforcement personnel. See S. Rep. No. 1097, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., 96 (1968).
The Court’s attempted obfuscation in Part II, ante, at 135-139, of its total disregard of the statutory mandate4 is a transparent failure. None of the cases discussed there deciding the reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment of searches and seizures deals with the discrete problems of wire interceptions or addresses the construction of the minimization requirement of § 2518 (5). Congress provided the answer to that problem, and the wording of its command, and not general Fourth Amendment principles, must be the guide to our decision. The Court offers no explanation for its failure to heed the aphorism: “Though we may not end with the words in construing a disputed statute, one certainly begins there.” Frankfurter, *147Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, 47 Colum. L. Rev. 527, 535 (1947).5
Moreover, today's decision does not take even a sidelong glance at United States v. Kahn, 415 U. S. 143 (1974), whose reasoning it undercuts, and which may now require overruling. Answering the question in Kahn of who must be named in an application and order authorizing electronic surveillance, the Court held:
“Title III requires the naming of a person in the application or interception order only when the law enforcement authorities have probable cause to believe that that individual is 'committing the offense' for which the wiretap is sought.” Id., at 155.
To support that holding against the argument that it would, in effect, approve a general warrant proscribed by Title III and the Fourth Amendment, see id., at 158-163 (Douglas, J., dissenting), the Court relied on the minimization requirement as an adequate safeguard to prevent such unlimited invasions of personal privacy:
“[I]n accord with the statute the order required the agents to execute the warrant in such a manner as to minimize the interception of any innocent conversations. . . . Thus, the failure of the order to specify that Mrs. Kahn's conversations might be the subject of interception hardly left the executing agents free to seize at will every communication that came over the wire — and there is no indication that such abuses took place in this case.” Id., at 154-155. (Footnotes omitted.)
Beyond the inconsistency of today's decision with the reasoning of Kahn, the Court manifests a disconcerting willingness to unravel individual threads of statutory protection without *148regard to their interdependence and to whether the cumulative effect is to rend ■ the fabric of Title Ill’s “congressionally designed bulwark against conduct of authorized electronic surveillance in a manner that violates the constitutional guidelines announced in Berger v. New York, 388 U. S. 41 (1967), and Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347 (1967)," Bynum v. United States, 423 U. S. 952 (1975) (Brennan, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). This process of myopic, incremental denigration of Title Ill’s safeguards raises the specter that, as judicially “enforced,” Title III may be vulnerable to constitutional attack for violation of Fourth Amendment standards, thus defeating the careful effort Congress made to avert that result.

 Prior to the enactment of Title III, § 605 of the Communications Act of 1934, ch. 652, 48 Stat. 1064, 1104, provided that “no person not being authorized by the sender shall intercept any communication and divulge or publish the existence, contents, substance, purport, effect, or meaning of such intercepted communication to any person . . . .”

 See United States v. Donovan, 429 U. S. 413, 445 (1977) (Marshall, J., dissenting in part); United States v. Kahn, 415 U. S. 143, 158 (1974) (Douglas, J., dissenting); see also United States v. Chavez, 416 U. S. 562, 580 (1974) (opinion of Douglas, J.).

 See United States v. Kahn, supra, at 160-162, and nn. 3-4 (Douglas, J., dissenting).

 Although the Court’s refusal to recognize as violative of § 2518 (5) a wiretap conducted in bad faith without regard to minimization necessarily will result in many invasions of privacy which otherwise would not occur, the objective requirement of “reasonableness” left unimpaired by the Court will clearly require suppression of interceptions in other circumstances. See, e. g., Bynum v. United States, 423 U. S. 952 (1975) (Brennan, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari).

 Accord, United States v. Kahn, 415 U. S., at 151 (“[T]he starting point, as in all statutory construction, is the precise wording chosen by Congress in enacting Title III”).