The importance of the question involved-whether, in view of the provisions of section 605 of the Communications Act of 1934, evidence procured by a federal officer's tapping telephone wires and intercepting messages is admissible in a criminal trial in a United States District Court-moved us to grant the writ of certiorari.
The indictment under which the petitioners were tried, convicted, and sentenced, charged, in separate counts, the smuggling of alcohol, possession and concealment of the smuggled alcohol, and conspiracy to smuggle and conceal it. Over the petitioners' objection and exception federal agents testified to the substance of petitioners' interstate communications overheard by the witnesses who had intercepted the messages be tapping telephone wires. The court below, though it found this evidence constituted such a vital part of the prosecution's proof that its admission, if erroneous, amounted to reversible error, held it was properly admitted and affirmed the judgment of conviction.
Section 605 of the Federal Communications Act provides that no person who, as an employe, has to do with the sending or receiving of any interstate communication by wire shall divulge or publish it or its substance to anyone other than the addressee or his authorized representative or to authorized fellow employes, save in response to a subpoena issued by a court of competent jurisdiction or on demand of other lawful authority; and '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.'
Section 501 penalizes wilful and knowing violation by fine and imprisonment.
Taken at face value the phrase 'no person' comprehends federal agents, and the ban on communication to 'any person' bars testimony to the content of an intercepted message. Such an application of the section is supported by comparison of the clause concerning intercepted messages with that relating to those known to employes of the carrier. The former may not be divulged to any person, the latter may be divulged in answer to a lawful subpoena.
The government contends that Congress did not intend to prohibit tapping wires to procure evidence. It is said that this court, in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 48 S.Ct. 564, 72 L.Ed. 944, 66 A.L.R. 376, held such evidence admissible at common law despite the fact that a state statute made wire-tapping a crime; and the argument proceeds that since the Olmstead decision departments of the federal government, with the knowledge of Congress, have, to a limited extent, permitted their agents to tap wires in aid of detection and conviction of criminals. It is shown that, in spite of its knowledge of the practice, Congress refrained from adopting legislation outlawing it, although bills, so providing, have been introduced. The Communications Act, so it is claimed, was passed only for the purpose of reenacting the provisions of the Radio Act of 1927 so as to make it applicable to wire messages and to transfer jurisdiction over radio and wire communications to the newly constituted Federal Communications Commission, and therefore the phraseology of the statute ought not to be construed as changing the practically identical provision on the subject which was a part of the Radio Act when the Olmstead Case was decided.
We nevertheless face the fact that the plain words of section 605 forbid anyone, unless authorized by the sender, to intercept a telephone message, and direct in equally clear language that 'no person' shall divulge or publish the message or its substance to 'any person.' To recite the contents of the message in testimony before a court is to divulge the message. The conclusion that the act forbids such testimony seems to us unshaken by the government's arguments.