Court Opinion

ID: 9461774
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:24:24.065607+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:15.537865
License: Public Domain

McGOWAN, Circuit Judge
(concurring in the judgment):
Believing, as I do, that this record presents no situation falling within the Congressional disclaimer of any purpose to limit “the constitutional power of the President to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the Nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States, or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities,” I have no occasion to look beyond the statute in order to reach the result reflected in the judgment.
Title III, in which the foregoing proviso appears, is a part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2520 — a statute which the Supreme Court characterized in Keith as “a comprehensive attempt by Congress to promote more effective control of crime while protecting the privacy of individual thought and expression.” 407 U.S. at 3(52, 92 S.Ct: at 2129. This case, like Keith, “raises no constitutional challenge to electronic surveillance as specifically authorized by Title III .,” nor, as the Supreme Court went on to say, “is there any question or doubt as to the necessity of obtaining a warrant in the surveillance of crimes unrelated to the national security interest,” as that interest is defined in the proviso. Id.- at 308, 92 S.Ct. at 2132.
Title III is addressed to law enforcement, which embraces the detection, prosecution, and prevention of crime. That, in my reading of the record, is what this case is about. Nowhere is that clearer than in the representations of the State Department that initiated the surveillance in question.
Those representations began on June 30, 1970 with a communication from the State Department to the FBI. The State Department official making that communication referred to having received the intra-departmental memorandum attached thereto “with a request that it be brought to the attention of federal law-enforcement authorities,” and concluded with an assurance that “the Department will be most grateful for anything you can do to assist us with this problem.” Exhibit B-l(l). The record includes at that point a protest from the Soviet Union to the State Department complaining of JDL activities that “cannot be qualified as anything but criminal,” and insisting that appropriate law enforcement steps be taken. Exhibit B-l(3). The memorandum attached to the June 30 communication was an internal State Department document which reads as follows:
The recent JDL raid on the Amtorg office in New York City is only the latest in a series of incidents which is causing increasing concern to the office of Soviet Union Affairs. I need not recount previous JDL-inspired actions as they are known to you.
I should like to note, however, that such JDL activity is beginning to have a negative effect on the conduct of our relations with the USSR: this has been noticeable in the area of cultural exchanges. In addition, the JDL’s resort to physical violence during its raid on the Amtorg office raises the possibility of Soviet retaliation against U.S. Embassy personnel in Moscow. Finally, it seems to me that the JDL is an organization of legitimate concern to Federal law-enforcement authorities, in view of the organization’s activities in various parts of the United States. (Emphasis supplied).
*682I would be grateful if you could bring our views to the attention of these law-enforcement authorities for whatever action they deem appropriate.
Exhibit B-l(2).
The law enforcement actions taken in response to that request resulted in a letter of February 10, 1971 from the Under Secretary of State to the Attorney General, of which the first paragraph is as follows:
All of us in the Department were pleased with the prompt action by the Federal Grand Jury which is currently investigating acts of violence attributed to the militant Jewish Defense League. We are hopeful that the return of indictments and resulting prosecutions under Federal statutes will demonstrate to JDL members and sympathizers, as well as to the American public and the international community, the resolve of the United States Government not to tolerate unlawful attacks upon official and commercial representatives of foreign governments. More fundamentally, we believe that the deterrent effect of such prosecutions upon violent anti-Soviet acts will measurably improve the ability of the United States to deal with the Soviet Union on substantive foreign policy issues such as those with which JDL leaders have expressed concern. (Emphasis supplied).
Exhibit B-l(5).
It thus appears that what the State Department sought was more effective enforcement of the criminal laws, and that such law enforcement was,- in its opinion, the way to minimize the harmful effect of the activities of the Jewish Defense League upon the relations of the United States and the Soviet Union.
It was not the State Department, but rather the FBI that significantly shifted the emphasis away from criminal law enforcement alone in its request to the Attorney General for authority to tap the telephone of the JDL headquarters for the purpose of obtaining advance knowledge of JDL activities generally so as to “allow for adequate countermeasures to be taken.” This was a reason stated in justification for its request for wire tap authority in the memorandum of the Director of the FBI to the Attorney General on September 14, 1970, and it was the reason which was repeated in the two successive memoranda asking renewal of that authority.1
However, this new and broader objective conceived by the FBI and the Department of Justice seems to me no less a law enforcement purpose than that of the State Department. At best it might be said that the threatened crimes in this case were of a kind that the FBI would have greatly preferred— by the provision of security and by other precautionary steps — to prevent rather than prosecute, but I cannot see why this generally laudable preference should make the difference.2 The effort to pre*683vent crime can always fail, in which case prosecution is sure to follow.3
I disagree, therefore, with Judge Wilkey’s assertion that the primary purpose of this surveillance, viewed from the perspective of either the State Department or the Justice Department, was something other than the “uncovering of evidence of domestic crime.”4 I disagree more fundamentally, however, with his suggestion that the “primary purpose” of a surveillance is the proper test of the statute’s applicability.5
An investigation may often have both prosecutorial and informational purposes. Different investigators may have different understandings of which of these is “primary.” At least at the outset, no conscious view may have been formed at all as to what is the investigation’s “primary purpose,” since no one can be sure of where it will lead. Even if a concerted and discrete “primary purpose” may sometimes exist in the minds of investigators, the task of proving or disproving it in later judicial proceedings is likely to be frustrating if not entirely futile. Moreover, a subjective test, such as Judge Wilkey suggests, invites the Government to supply national security purposes after the fact; and, to the extent it is successful, permits it to ignore a statute avowedly protective of important individual rights.6
My preference would be for a more objective test of the statute’s applicability, and one which allowed it to be much less easily displaced.7 For present pur*684poses, it is enough that that section was not intended to apply when the subjects of surveillance are themselves so indirectly related to any foreign power. Note should be taken of the exact language of § 2511(3). It does not say that the statute is inapplicable to any surveillance with implications, however remote, for the nation’s foreign relations; it merely abjures any intent to legislate with respect to the constitutional power of the President (in pertinent part)
to take such measures as he deems necessary to protect the Nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States, or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities.
The nonstatutory surveillances here at issue must be defended as being “necessary to protect the Nation against . hostile acts of a foreign power.” I would construe the quoted phrase as referring only to surveillances directed against agents of, or collaborators with, the foreign power whose hostile acts are feared. It was with such agents and collaborators that Congress was, in my submission, specifically concerned.8 I see strong reasons not to construe the language more broadly.
In cases, such as the one before us, where the national security concern is purely that a foreign power might be provoked into hostile acts by the activity of the subjects of surveillance, none of the policies arguably underlying the national security exception to the statute are operative. A heightened necessity of secrecy is sometimes thought to distinguish national security surveillances, but there is nothing secret about what the JDL was up to, or the reasons that it was thought dangerous, or even the fact that members of that organization were under close investigation.9 There is also sometimes thought to be a lack of judicial competence to deal with national security matters, but there was nothing in the least arcane about JDL activities and their implications. It may well be that the conduct of our foreign affairs is better left to the State Department than to the judiciary, but foreign affairs entered this case only because foreign citizens *685were the victims of actual and threatened criminal offenses, and, as has already been made clear, the only expressed concern of the State Department was that those offenses be averted or prosecuted.
A holding that the President may protect against “hostile acts of a foreign power” by spying upon our own citizens simply because they may provoke such acts opens a gaping and particularly dangerous hole in the statute. The following come quickly to mind as among those who would be subject to non-statutory10 surveillance under this theory: a Congressional opponent of detente, on the ground that it must be known in advance when he will take some action to unsettle delicate trade negotiations; leakers of confidential information, on the ground that they will destroy the trust and candor of communications with our allies; organized resistors of American military actions, on the ground that they demoralize the troops and incite the enemy; multinational corporations, on the ground that violations of the law by such corporations are a major cause of foreign ill-will; suspected perpetrators of any crime that can become an “international incident” (the smuggling of an art treasure out of a foreign country, the smuggling into it of large amounts of narcotics, etc.).
The foregoing list is only intended to be suggestive, but what it says to me is that, where the activities under Government surveillance are foreign-related only by way of the foreign reaction they may provoke, those activities are likely to be either criminal, in which case the Government should submit to Congress’s decision that only certain crimes pose a sufficient threat to justify surveillance, or protected by the First Amendment, in which case there should ordinarily be no surveillance. After all, if domestic activities, without being unlawful, are such as to attract the attention of a foreign power, they are bound to be of a political or at least self-expressive nature.
Such First Amendment concerns are, of course, vividly illustrated by the facts of this case. The first paragraph of Mr. Hoover’s initial memorandum requesting wiretap authority is as follows:
The captioned organization has recently emerged as the most militant pro-Jewish organization active in the United States. It has demonstrated its proclivity for demonstrations and violence by attacks on Soviet and Arab diplomatic installations in this country, as well as by participation in demonstrations in New York City, which have resulted in injury to private citizens and law enforcement officers. News media have reported that the leader of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) on September 8, 1970, stated that his organization might attempt to hijack Arab terrorist groups in the current tensions surrounding the Middle East situation.
It will be seen that the reference is both to “demonstrations,” and to violent attacks on people and property; as well as threats of airline hijacking. In the second paragraph of that memorandum, the Director refers to the impending opportunity of the JDL “for violence or demonstrations against the foreign leaders in furtherance of JDL aims for support for Israel and the Jewish race.” The tell-tale “or” is surely not without significance. The duality of these expressions is subtle and perhaps below the level of consciousness, but its consequences can be substantial. It leads, in the Government’s present submission, to the legal conclusion that the warrant requirements of Title III need not be observed, which in turn means that the FBI can, without constraint from the *686statute, add to its stores of information about people who demonstrate, as well as those who have committed, or may reasonably be thought likely to commit, crimes.
This, in my conception, was exactly what Title III was designed to prevent. It is why law enforcement authorities should not, by an expansive reading of the foreign intelligence proviso, convert requests for more effective enforcement of the criminal laws into opportunities for warrantless invasions of privacy, especially where, as here, those whose privacy is invaded have no affinity with the foreign power whose hostile acts are the Government’s professed concern.11
Judge Wright’s discussion of the general problem of whether there should be a foreign security exception to the constitutional warrant requirement, though a scholarly effort of extraordinary proportions, seems to me unnecessary.12 Moreover, unreserved concurrence in it could only, or so it seems to me, be understood as signifying a personal conviction that no such exception exists. We may or may not ultimately so hold, but the complexity and importance of the problem require that we address it only in our most sure-footed way, that is to say, on the concrete facts of a case presenting the issue squarely.
If and when we are called upon to decide that question, our task may be greatly complicated by our having held today that, wherever the Constitution requires a warrant,, the statute requires compliance with some, albeit concededly not all, of its mandated procedures. That holding, in my view, flies in the face of both the Supreme Court’s Keith opinion and the statute itself.
As to the former, the plain meaning of the language of Keith seems to me to be that there are certain national security surveillances to which the statute was not intended to apply, and that the surveillance then before the Court was one of them.13 It is perhaps possible to read *687the Court’s phrase, “did not legislate,” as “legislated contingent upon the Constitution.” It is possible also to conclude that when the Court stated later in its Keith opinion that perhaps Congress “would judge” the statutory procedures inapplicable to national security surveillance, 407 U.S. at 323, 92 S.Ct. 2125, it meant that perhaps Congress “would reconsider” their applicability. Even if these possible meanings commended themselves to us as the more sensible ones,14 our obligation is to remain faithful to the Court’s most probable meaning in Keith, and I cannot believe that that meaning is one which can only be derived by the employment of as much ingenuity as Judge Wright has shown.
Far more important, since the statements in Keith are dicta in any event, is the statute itself. To the textual and historical arguments that Judge Wilkey has quite forcefully made against the statute’s applicability to all surveillances requiring a warrant, I will add only this. Judge Wright has somewhat understated the number of procedural provisions in the statute which will have to be altered or ignored before they are applied to non-criminal national security surveillances. He mentions, as calling for this treatment, § 2516, enumerating the criminal offenses which may form the justification for surveillance, and § 2518(l)(b)(i), requiring the applicant for a warrant to give details of the offense.15 There are also the following:
—§ 2518(l)(b)(iv), requiring the warrant applicant to give “the identity of the person, if known, committing the offense . . .; ”
—§ 2518(3), allowing the judge to issue a warrant only if
(a) there is probable cause for belief; that an individual is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a particular offense enumerated in section 2516 of this chapter;
(b) there is probable cause for belief that particular communications concerning that offense will be obtained through such interception;
(d) there is probable cause for belief that the facilities from which, or the place where, the wire or oral communications are to be intercepted are being used, or are about to be used, in connection with the commission of such offense, or are leased to, listed in the name of, or commonly used by such person.
—§ 2518(4)(c), requiring that the warrant itself contain “. . .a statement
of the particular offense to which it relates; ”
—and § 2519(l)(e), requiring the judge to report to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, within thirty days of a surveillance’s termination or denial, “the offense specified in the order or application.”
The criminal “offense” is thus pervasively assumed in §§ 2518 and 2519. It is the linchpin of the operation of those sections, giving strong reason to doubt that they were intended to be applied, as Judge Wright would apply them, where there is no offense at all.16

. See Exhibits I-IV. The Government maintains that the fruits of the surveillance in this case were used solely for the purpose of providing security. The Attorney General’s authorizations for the surveillances indicate that they were carried out subject to an earlier directive to the FBI (not itself of record) that overhearings of defendants and attorneys in pending criminal prosecutions were to be avoided if possible; and, if they could not be avoided, their contents were to be sealed and not made available to other Justice Department personnel. Exhibits I, II. See also Exhibit IV at 31 (Deposition of John Mitchell). Whether the fruits of the surveillances in this case were in fact ever used in any criminal prosecution is not ascertainable from this record.

. I would stress this point in response to the claims by both Judge Wright and Judge Wilkey that the FBI’s role in this case was something other than that of law enforcement. I assume that numerous conversations took place between the Justice Department and the National Security Council and State Department, that their tenor was as Judge Wright describes, see Wright op., 170 U.S.App.D.C. at-n.39, 516 F.2d at 612 n.39, and that the ultimate goal of all concerned was indeed to shore up the new and fragile foundations of detente. Since Judge Pratt found no more *683than this, I assert no factual error on his part. But the fact remains that what had to be done in order to reach that goal was to enforce the law, either by preventing or by prosecuting violations of it, when such violations were directed at Soviet property and personnel.
Judge Wilkey seems to concede that the prevention of crime is as much a law enforcement purpose as its prosecution, but argues that the FBI’s purpose, rather than the “prevention of crime per se,” was “keep[ing] the Bureau and the State Department informed of every movement, criminal and noncriminal, of the JDL which might exacerbate our position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.” Wilkey op., 170 U.S.App. D.C. at - n.11, 516 F.2d at 690-691 n.ll. There is no record evidence of the State Department’s having requested such prior information about lawful-yet-exacerbatory JDL movements (presumbably demonstrations and harassments), and I doubt that such information would have been of any significant use to it if it had. That the FBI sought to inform itself about noncriminal as well as criminal activites, I have no doubt. Still I am not ready to assume that the gaining of foreknowledge of entirely lawful activities was that agency’s primary purpose.

. Whether or not it has been the Government’s practice to refrain from using fruits of nonstatutory surveillances in criminal prosecutions, see note 1 supra, that practice clearly is not required either by the Constitution or by the statute, which expressly authorizes the use of such fruits where the surveillance was reasonable. See § 2511(3).

. Wilkey. op., 170 U.S.App.D.C. at -, 516 F.2d at 691.

. Judge Wilkey enunciates such a “primary purpose” test for the statute’s applicability infra, 170 U.S.App.D.C. on pages - and-, 516 F.2d on pages 690 and 694. 170 U.S.App.D.C. at p. -, 516 F.2d at p. 697 he suggests a different test when he states that
If it appears to the trial judge that the sole objective of a “foreign affairs” or domestic security wiretap was that of gathering specific evidence with regard to one of the crimes enumerated in section 2516 — as opposed, for example, to garnering information to ward off or prevent the “hostile acts” of another country — then he has the discretion to prevent an end run around Title III by holding the surveillance invalid. (Emphasis added).
If the principle is that a non-prosecutorial motive makes the statute inapplicable if it is only one of the Government’s objectives, then my disagreement is even more emphatic.

. The problem of post hoc rationalization would be somewhat alleviated if we could be sure that, because of an independent constitutional warrant requirement, the question of the statute’s applicability could also be decided before the fact. We do not know whether such an independent requirement exists, however, and since I find a purpose test otherwise unacceptable, I do not think it a sufficient reason to reach the constitutional question that its answer might make such a test more palatable.

. When confronted, as we now are, by the question of whether a particular statute requires the President to utilize the means it explicitly provides him, or leaves him free to rely on his undefined powers under the Consti*684tution, we should in general prefer the former construction. The President is on his strongest footing when acting with statutory authority, and we should assume, when Congress has been unclear, that it intended that he proceed in that way. The Steel Seizure Case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 72 S.Ct. 863, 96 L.Ed. 1153 (1952), still speaks eloquently to the point. Indeed, Justice Jackson suggests just such a canon of construction in his statement that “[i]n view of the ease, expedition and safety with which Congress can grant and has granted large emergency powers, certainly ample to embrace this crisis, I am quite unimpressed with the argument that we should affirm possession of them without statute.” Id. at 653, 72 S.Ct. at 879. (emphasis supplied). The statutory authority provided by Congress in Title III strikes me as “certainly ample to embrace this crisis” involved in this case.

. See S.Rep.No.1097, 90th Cong., 2d Sess., at 94 (1968), U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News, 1968, pp. 2112, 2182, 2183 (quoted at length in Judge Wilkey’s op., 170 U.S.App.D.C. at---, 516 F.2d at 693-695). The Report’s only example of a foreign national security surveillance which might take place within the United States was one directed at “the domestic Communist party and its front groups [who] remain instruments of the foreign policy of a foreign power . . .’’In discussing the kinds of people who are within the scope of § 2511(3) but may nonetheless be prosecuted with the fruits of “reasonable” nonstatutory surveillances, the Report refers to “agents of foreign powers and those who cooperate with them.”

. Secrecy was quite the opposite of the JDL’s express objective, which was to exacerbate Soviet-American relations and dramatize the plight of Russian Jews by the commission of crimes that were as flagrant and well-publicized as possible. In newspaper reports made a part of the record Meir Kahane, a leader of the JDL, is quoted as stating that “[w]e must break every law to save three million Soviet Jews.” Schwartz, Threats and Bombs — A Nasty Phase for the Two Nations, N.Y. Times, Jan. 10, 1971, Exhibit C-2. Also reported is the same individual’s boast that “[f]or the first time in fifty-three years, the Soviet Jewish problem is on Page One throughout the country, and we are responsible for that.” N.Y. Daily News, Jan. 13, 1971, Exhibit C-3.

. The word non-statutory is used because it may be that surveillances of this kind would be subject to a constitutional warrant requirement. The latter may not, however, provide anything like the same protection. For exam-pie, it leaves the Government free from what seems to me the very important constraint of having to make public the nature and amount of its surveillance. See § 2519.

. There is nothing in Keith inconsistent with the application of the statute to the surveillance now before us, even assuming that the Supreme Court thought it inapplicable to the surveillance that took place in that case. For one thing, that surveillance was exempted under a different part of § 2511(3), that referring to presidential power, without constraint from the statute, to protect “against the overthrow of the Government by force or other unlawful means, or against any other clear and present danger to the structure and existence of the Government.” More important, the surveillance was directed against individuals who were themselves thought to be the source of the national security threat — in that case the dynamite bombing of an office of the Central Intelligence Agency — rather than against individuals whose actions could only indirectly bring about such a threat.

. Judge Wright’s primary objection to my failure to reach the constitutional question is based on his view that § 2511(3) disclaims any intent on the part of Congress to require a warrant where the President could constitutionally proceed without one. See Wright op. 170 U.S.App.D.C. at - n.46, 516 F.2d at 614 n.46. Clearly, if I shared this view, I could not end the inquiry in this case without first satisfying myself that the surveillance was not encompassed by some exception to the constitutional warrant requirement. I do not construe § 2511(3) as Judge Wright does, however. I disagree with his interpretation of the word “constitutional” in that section as making the statute “contingent” on the Constitution in any sense, even the limited sense of its never requiring a warrant if the Constitution would not require one. The word “constitutional” refers, in my view;, to the source of the presidential powers which are left undisturbed by the statute. Precisely which of those powers it did leave undisturbed (and I think entirely undisturbed, constitutional warrant requirement or no) are defined by the language of § 2511(3), within which the surveillance now before us simply does not fit. I do not, in other words, think, that Congress cared whether this surveillance could constitutionally have been carried out without a warrant. It is not a surveillance within the true foreign national security area of which Congress was so wary, and in which it therefore chose not to legislate. It is instead within the area regulated by the statute.

. Judge Wilkey has well stated the case for this interpretation of Keith. The only fact of significance to me that he has omitted is , that Justice White concurred in that case on the ground that the statute applied. Apparently the majority disagreed, as it could not have done were Judge Wright’s reading of the statute the correct one.

. Judge Wright sets out a number of advantages which could be gained from considering Title III as applicable to all court-ordered surveillances. Wright op., 170 U.S.App.D.C. at---, 516 F.2d at 667-669. He also concedes, however, that his strained (in my view) reading of the statute is not the only way to achieve many of those advantages. Id. 170 U.S.App.D.C. at---, 516 F.2d at 668-669. Nothing prevents the courts from selectively incorporating whichever of the statute’s procedures are truly appropriate as elements of the “reasonableness” which both the Constitution and the statute require.

. See also Wright op., 170 U.S.App.D.C. at - n.266, 516 F.2d at 668-669 n.266.

. Neither can I agree that, on the basis of § 2511(3)’s disavowal of any intent to limit the President’s powers, the statute should be judicially tailored to fit national security cases. Even accepting Judge Wright’s suggestion that only those statutory procedures be altered which would otherwise “unduly trammel” or “substantially affect” the President’s national security surveillance powers, the result is, once again, a more radical surgery on the statute than Judge Wright has described. Among *688the statute’s procedural requirements are the following: that an applicant for a warrant give “a full and complete statement of the facts concerning all previous applications involving any of the same persons, facilities or places . . 18 U.S.C. § 2518(l)(e)(1970); that an applicant for extension of a warrant beyond its maximum thirty days divulge “the results thus far obtained id. § 2518(l)(f); and that recordings of all interceptions be immediately made available to the issuing judge, to be preserved as he directs for at least ten years. Id. § 2518(8)(b). A President who was unwilling for security reasons to comply with such requirements might consider that they “trammeled” his power to carry out national security surveillances to the point of making them impossible.