Wire Tappers

BOARDS & BUREAUS

In 28 States anyone discovered tapping telephone wires is liable to a fine, jail, or both. But since 1928, when a 5-to-4 U. S. Supreme Court decision upheld the validity of evidence procured against a Puget Sound bootlegging gang by wiretapping Prohibition agents, the Federal Government has become one of the most efficient wiretappers in the U. S. Last week another Supreme Court decision, this time 7-to-2, gave Federal eavesdroppers a sharp box on the ears.

When Frank Nardone, Austin Callahan, Hugh Brown and Robert Gottfried were brought to trial in Manhattan last year for smuggling alcohol, an Alcohol Tax Unit investigator introduced into the record excerpts from 72 tapped telephone conversations. After Nardone was sentenced to three years in prison and his companions to a year and a day each, they appealed their convictions on the ground that Section 605 of the Federal Communications Act of 1934 forbids any person not authorized by the sender to intercept or divulge telephone messages. Denied new trials by a U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals, they got them last week when Justice Roberts' majority decision held that "to recite the contents of the message in testimony before a court is to divulge the message," that the Act applied to "Federal officers as well as others." Justices Sutherland and McReynolds, who in 1928 (along with Justices Taft, Sanford and Van Devanter) upheld it, again dissented, snorted that their colleagues were losing "all sense of proportion." To the confusion of observers Justice Hugo LaFayette Black, who in 1935 as a Senatorial investigator blatantly commandeered the telegraph messages of William Randolph Hearst and others, voted against wire tapping.

Like private wire tappers, Federal wire tappers work in a number of ways--clipping connections, installing induction coils in receivers, attaching amplifiers to the walls behind instruments and listening from an adjoining room--all of which are frowned on by telephone companies. American Telephone & Telegraph, which appeared as a "friend of the court" in the first U. S. Supreme Court case to urge that telephone conversations are private property, cooperates with Federal agents if necessary but has long been campaigning for an act of Congress to outlaw the practice altogether.

Unabashed by the decision, Attorney General Cummings, whose department ranks with the Alcohol Tax Unit and the Bureau of Internal Revenue as a first-class wire tapper, announced that he would authorize no more tapping at present. But, because the decision apparently affected only the use of wire tapping for evidence and the Federal Communications Act is limited to interstate messages, Federal agencies may still have use for their equipment, which is stored in a common fund in Washington and shipped to field operatives in plain wooden boxes. To determine whether the results of intrastate tapping are admissible as evidence, the Department of Justice announced that material it has gathered regarding a Washington gambling syndicate headed by one Abe Plisco, alias Jewboy Dietz, might soon be used in a test case.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.