Wiretapping and Violation of Rights and Fourth Amendment - Research Paper Example

Wiretapping and Violation of Rights and Fourth Amendment Task Wiretapping and Violation of Rights and Fourth Amendment Introduction The legal right of privacy of electronic based communications, such as wiretapping, base on how the United States constitution, and specifically the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Human rights interpretation. The Fourth amendment states that individuals have a right of being secured, meaning that their houses, papers and other effects are not unreasonably searched, and seizure or violated. Moreover, no warrant of arrest shall be issued unless a probable cause have been created by the security agents, court and which is supported by an affirmation or an oath describing the place, person or things to be searched. The constitutional drafters never considered the possibility of digital or electronic based communication. Amazingly, in the 20th century, the electronic communication gadgets were widespread and the law enforcement agencies started wiretapping in their investigation without obtaining the warrants for search. As a result numerous conviction were raised among them, the famous; Katz v. United States in 1967. In most cases, the investigators lost the suit and compelled to compensate the victims hence the court had to appeal to the congress for amendment and include electronic and wiretapping privacy (Schroeder, 2012). This after the sensible based expectation of privacy test caused a lot of controversial based jurisprudence, full of incoherence and even inconsistency (Morgan, 2010). A lot of fury Debates over whether U.S government information gathering agencies should take actions by invading peoples’ privacy. The aim of this research paper is to explore the wiretapping and violation or rights and fourth amendment. To be consistent and seal the research gap, the researcher relied on the case of Katz v. United States in 1967.Therefore,the research paper answer the question; Did the U.S government violate Katz’s Fourth Amendment legal rights when its agents attached some electronic listening and recording devices to the outside of the telephone booth she used? This question was answered by looking on whether the warrantless based wiretapping of the public phones booth violate the unreasonable based search and seizure clause of the fourth amendments within the united states constitutions. Discussion The aim of this paper was to look into the wiretapping and violation or rights and fourth amendment. This was embedded on the following issue. However, before answering the question, I looked into the fact of the case, the procedural history, Constitutional issues of the case, the ruling, decision and rationale used to arrive at the decision and various concurrences made by different judges. Issue/Question Did the U.S government violate Katz’s Fourth Amendment legal rights when its agents attached some electronic listening and recording devices to the outside of the telephone booth she used? The fact of the Katz v. United States in 1967 The petitioner; Charles Katz usedpublic paid phone booth to transmit some illegal gambling operations across various state lines such as Los Angeles to Miami and Boston which was a total violation of the federal law. The federal agents decided to collect evidence against Charles Katz by placing some warrantless wiretap on the public phone that he was using to conduct such gambling operations. In the process, the agents were only listening to Katz’s conversations and especially that part of the story dealing with illegal gambling based transaction. The federal agents used to place eavesdropping devices on the exterior side of the telephone booth without Katz permission. Later the Federal Bureau Investigators convicted Kats and filed a suit against him for illegal gambling. At the trial, Katz excluded any evidence connected to the wiretaps by stating that the federal agents violated his rights and the fourth amendment rights on privacy. He argued that warrantless wiretapping of any public phone booth was equivalent to unreasonable search and hence it is a constitutional violation of the fourth amendment. He revealed that telephone is a constitutionally protected area and therefore the agents violated his rights. The federal agents cited that phone booths are not constitutionally protected areas and therefore they had a right to place a wiretap without a court warrant (Freiwald, 2007). The court of appeal sided with FBI that they did not physically intrude and violate the amendment. However, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling by grant Charles Katz certiorari right hence revealing that they violated fourth amendment and human rights on privacy. The Supreme Court relied on previous rulings made such as the case of Olmstead UnitedStates (1928), in which the same court ruled that warrantless wiretapping of any communication line did not amount to an unreasonable search as indicated in the fourth amendment. The court went further to stare that physical entry into a given area amount to trespass and not just a mere voice amplification as just required by the federal law. However, they had to approach the congress in 1933 where the later eventually passed the Federal Communication Act of 1933.This Act required that all federal security agencies to obtain warrant before wiretapping and private or public phone booth line. This was also repeated in 1961 under the case of Silverman .V. United States by refining the doctrine and ruling that unreasonable search can only occur if stated and authorized through a warrant under the constitution of the land. Therefore from the above question; Did the U.S government violate Katz’s Fourth Amendment legal rights when its agents attached some electronic listening and recording devices to the outside of the telephone booth she used? The procedural history Before the amendment of the fourth section of the court, there was that tendency of the courts to convene their ruling on the non-digital communication mentioning section and therefore support unreasonable wireless tapping without warrant. This was evident from the appellate-based court, which upheld the conviction, holding that Katz’s based Fourth Amendment protection from the unreasonable searches or seizures made by the federal investigators was not violated at all. This is because the agents never physically entered the phone based booth line. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed the lower court. This was a mere total difference between the higher and lower tier courts. Secondly, it reflected that the federal bureau investigators through the missing word in the act were violating human rights in wiretappings. Essentially, this reveals why the supreme courts are vital in explaining and interpreting further the rule of law to relieve the aggrieved party from their own right violation. Ruling The ruling of the case revealed that the united states governmentviolate Katz’s Fourth Amendment legal rights when its agents attached some electronic listening and recording devices to the outside of the telephone booth she used as revealed in the by the supreme courts. According to Justice Stewart,the government’s action of electronically listening and wiretapping or recording the petitioners conversation violated the legal right of privacy upon which he justifiably relied on while using the telephone line and thus amount to a form of search and seizure as indicted in the interpretation of the of the Fourth Amendment section. Secondly, regardless of the location, any conversation is rightfully is protected from any unreasonable based seizure or search as indicated under the Fourth Amendment and especially if it was meant for any reasonable expectation legal right of privacy. Therefore, wiretapping counts as one of the forms of search and physical intrusion (White and James 2004). Decision made The court used the voting rationale to know whose between the two parties had formulated the issue wrongly. The Supreme Court judges voted seven votes against one in favor of Katz. They agreed with him that any placement of an unwarranted wiretapping equipment on any public phone booth or line amount to a reasonable violation of the fourth amendment because it is unwarranted search or seizure (Morgan, 2012). However, the majority decision made through justice potter Stewart did fully address the case from the constitutional based protected area. In essence, the judge argued that both sides; defendant and plaintiff sides were not right to think that any permissibility of a warranted based wiretap depended on the area that had been placed under investigation based surveillance. He thought that the fourth amendment protected only the concerned parties and not places. Therefore, what a person tries to expose to the public even it is his house or home does not fall under the subject matter outlined in the fourth amendment-based protection. Nevertheless, it should also be noted that what you are seeking to preserve just as private in any public based accessible was already termed as under the constitutionally protected areas. In the voting process of 7-1 votes, Justice Black voted in favor of the federal bureau investigators meaning that they did what was right in tapping the information without a warrant. Justice Marshall never took place in the voting process. First he expressed the majority’s decision by stating that if an individual occupies a certain telephone, then he shut the door behind him when he do pay the toll, there is a right which protect him while making a call in such an environment (Duke University 2009). The person is in enclosed environment and therefore any word uttered should not be captured and broad casted to the world. Certain aspect for instance shutting up of the door on the telephone based booth help the court to know the intention of the person in making such call privately.Therefore, it is permissible to make any private based conversation in public protected areas. Reasoning Based upon this reasoning, the Supreme Court revealed that the judiciary had a duty to review all petition based warrants in certain instances, such as the one where the person is engaging in certain conduct that they are planning to keep some secret. The individuals have rights to make personal and private based conversations in public areas. In addition to that, the court went further to upheld that in case of judicial system absentee based search warrants, no wiretap should be used in public booth lines to record conversations even the transaction made are illegal. Therefore, the federal bureau investigators violated the rule of law as stipulated within the fourth amendment of the United States constitution. This clearly indicates that all evidence gathered against Katz from the illegal gambling transaction based conversation was null and void hence suppressed. This reasoning was different from the one made by the court of appeal judge. The judge made his rule based on the reason that the wiretapping clause has not been captured in the constitution hence a pre-assumption that the federal agents were right in wiretapping the conversation. The judge never rat ionized on whether there was no pre-assumption in the law. He also failed review some of the previous case laws that highlighted on how the Supreme Court had ruled in various similar case scenarios. This reflected that Charles Katz could have been punished and sentenced to imprisonment yet the constitution did not warrant the federal officers to wiretap his conversation. Concurrences Justice John Marshall Harlan’s Concurrence: Test for the constitutional based protected searches The justice Marshallopinion agrees with the majority opinion of the court. Harlan went further to provide a test for what is usually called constitutional based protected search. In this argument, he revealed that it was necessary to clarify when a given private action was being conducted in public sites for constitutional protection. In expanding further the general principle made by the majority based opinion, his test was divided into other two prong based tests found to determine on whether privacy existed (Kerr, 2014). First, the individual must show an actual expectation of the privacy and secondly the society must be prepared to recognize that the expectation was reasonable and it existed at any given circumstance. This reveals that in case of privacy and for an individual to be protected under any public land, there must be a clear line of distinction that there existed a harmony between the individual and the society. The society must recognize the privacy setting as well as the individual creating it. This test of Harlan was adopted and applied in 1979 where a majority rule was presided on Smith v. Maryland case. Therefore, both the Supreme Court and other lower based federal courts looked into the two-pronged test but it was only the majority holding who could make the right decision in determining when a given private based action in any public place can be said to be constitutionally protected. This is the test that has been typically applied when deciding all other subsequent constitutional cases relating to warrantless based wiretaps. The ruling was made in a manner as to consider both the societal and individualistic rights. This helped Charles Katz from being imprisoned for making ruthless conversation about illegal gambling through the telephone booth. Justice Blacks dissent Justice Black made a dissenting statement from the Katz case. His discussion on the above subject matter was quoted from the Supreme Court rulings on electronic based surveillance. He began his statement by saying that it was essential that the ruling on protection of electronic privacy appeared nowhere in the constitution of the land.In fact, he compared the rule to that of Olmstead Court which was not delivered because it called for an extension of the meaning of seizure and search. Therefore his dissented opinion indeed up revealing that the decision made by the supreme court over the Katz case amount to total revision and overhaul of the fourth amendment of the constitution. A keen examination of Black dissent argument reveals that he employed the originality interpretation of the fourth amendment in the constitution, which cannot be fully reconciled with the activist based stands. The philosophy of any original understanding isusually based on the neutral legal principle applications, which in turn include among other things the deriving, application and defining of the key principle. In most cases, judge will be subjected into seeking the original based understanding of the words in the constitutional text to remain a legal rather than a constitutional political institution. This means that the court is not free in defining the scope of the principles before it because the outcome of the decision may fall out of the original blanket of understanding and as per the main application to be made (Friedman, 2009). In reality, such ruling grounds cannot come from the legislature, and from the personal based preference for the justice. Black seemed to have applied his decision on the meaning of the word ‘eaves dropping “where the supreme court defined the wiretapping as a kind of seizure and search rather than accurately giving the meaning eavesdropping as deified in the electronic based dictionary. He reveals that the Supreme Court’s opinion as a key to open the door for more enactment and enforcement of other series of laws regulations and particular those relating to wiretapping. This means that there may be subsequent amendment s in the fourth section of the constitution to include but not limited to the wiretapping. This was a similar problem faced by the Berger court when Berger wanted to be given a warrant of electronic surveillance and physical intrusion rights. This interpretation was wrong because a warrant of search and seizure requires all parties to be notified before surveillance. In the case of electronic surveillance, the obvious defeated the effectiveness because there is no need of having such notification. Therefore, in his argument, it is necessary to have such obstacles to regulations relating to wiretapping be removed because the Supreme Court could not make a clear distinction between eavesdropping and search and seizure. His conviction was embedded on two grounds. First, the words of the fourth amendment do not give the true meaning of the decision by the court. Secondly, it is not the role of the Supreme Court to rewrite any amendment but the congress as a legislative body and to bring the changes to the times. Therefore, we can deduce from his argument that judges should convene the ruling only to the words captured in the constitutional based texts. Secondly, the justices have no right in rewriting any given federal laws section but that work should be done by the democratically elected legislature which in our case is the congress. However, his argument was baseless because he condenses the decision only to tangible things and not even conversation. Therefore, Katz was not supposed to be protected because the fourth amendment looks into the tangible things only. He ended up stating that fourth amendment does not apply to the eavesdropping and the Supreme Court should not rule in favor of Katz. This argument illustrates a tension that arises between those who have the strict constitutional statements and those who uses the underlying principles to apply correct rule of law to changes such as technology and new issues within our society. Conclusion The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution was one of the controversial sections of the federal laws because the framers never look into new issues such as technology in future. The federal agencies found it hard to implicate those who commit crimes once they decided to wiretap the conversation. The criminals used the weakness of the section to elope the rule of law by arguing that the amendment does not allow wiretapping in constitutional protected area. This can be clearly seen I the case of Katz versus the United States in 1967, where the Supreme Court ruled that he should not have been recorded without a warrant from the court. Essentially, the justices ended up voting and amending the constitutional fourth section in order to ensure that the right of the individual was protected even if not captured in the text (Solove, 2011). However, there are those judges like Black who held on the ground that the Supreme Court should convene its ruling on the words scribed on the constitution of the land. References Duke University. (2009). Fourth amendment rights and electronic communications. Retrieved from https://www.cs.duke.edu/~chase/cps49s/carnivore-history.html Freiwald, Susan (2007). Privacy”. Stanford Technology Law Review (3). Friedman, L. (2009). The justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their lives and major opinions. New Jersey: Chelsea House Publishers. Kerr, O. S. (2014). "Katz has only one step: The irrelevance of subjective expectations". University of Chicago Law Review, 5(4), 13-19. Morgan, C. (2010). Challenges and issues today in intellectual freedom. Manhattan: Office for Intellectual Freedom. Morgan, Candace (2012).Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347 (1967),Cornell University Law School.Newyork.P.14-25 Schroeder, Steve. (2012) The Lure: The True Story of How the Department of Justice Brought Down Two of the Worlds Most Dangerous Cyber Criminals, Cengage Learning.p. 127 Solove, D. J. (2011).Fourth amendment pragmatism.Boston College Law Review, 51(6), 1511-1539. White, Welsh S., and James J. Tomkovicz. (2004). Criminal Procedure: Constitutional Constraints upon Investigation and Proof. Newark, NJ: LexisNexis Matthew Bender, p.6 Read More