Word: warranting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...restaurant. On the basis of the agents' eavesdropping testimony, White was convicted of seven drug offenses, fined $35,000 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. A U.S. appeals court later threw out the conviction on the ground that the agents had failed to get a judge-approved warrant and therefore the bugging violated the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures...
Four Justices disagreed, arguing that where monitored meetings are prearranged, as in the White case, the Government has a minimal obligation to get a warrant before listening in. Justice John Harlan called third-party bugging a danger that could undermine even the most innocent confidential relationships between citizens. "Were third-party bugging a prevalent practice," said Harlan, "it might well smother that spontaneity-reflected in frivolous, impetuous, sacrilegious and defiant discourse-that liberates daily life...
After years of confusion over the legalities of electronic eavesdropping, Congress attempted to set rules in the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968. Law-enforcement agencies were permitted to wiretap in ordinary criminal cases, provided they first obtained a court-approved warrant. Under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, such warrants require "probable cause"-proof that officials are probing with specific evidence of a crime, not just trying to trap possible wrongdoers. The 1968 law, though, did not limit the President's power "to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States...
...police were armed with a search warrant empowering them to seize photographs, negatives, and undeveloped film that might be used as evidence against demonstrators who fought with police the previous Friday at the Stanford University Medical Center...
John T. Berlow '71, charged with criminal trespass by the University for disrupting the teach-in, spoke briefly. He said the warrant had not yet been served on him and that "apparently they aren't trying very hard...