03/02/2020 Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 US 514 - Supreme Court 2001 - Google Scholar assume that the words he utters into the mouthpiece will not be broadcast to the world." Katz v. United States, 389 U. S. 347, 352 (1967); cf. Gelbard v. United States, 408 U. S. 41, 52 (1972) (compelling testimony about matters obtained from an illegal interception at a grand jury proceeding "compounds the statutorily proscribed invasion of . . . privacy by adding to the injury of the interception the insult of . . . disclosure"). These statutes undeniably protect this venerable right of privacy. Concomitantly, they further the First Amendment rights of the parties to the conversation. "At the heart of the First Amendment lies the principle that each person should decide 554 for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence." Turner Broadcasting, 512 U. S., at 641. By "protecting the privacy of individual thought and expression," United States *554 v. United States Dist. Court for Eastern Dist. of Mich., 407 U. S. 297, 302 (1972), these statutes further the "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open" speech of the private parties, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254, 270 (1964). Unlike the laws at issue in the Daily Mail cases, which served only to protect the identities and actions of a select group of individuals, these laws protect millions of people who communicate electronically on a daily basis. The chilling effect of the Court's decision upon these private conversations will surely be great: An estimated 49.1 million analog cellular telephones are currently in operation. See Hao, Nokia Profits from Surge in Cell Phones, Fla. Today, July 18, 1999, p. E1. Although the Court recognizes and even extols the virtues of this right to privacy, see ante, at 532-533, these are "mere words," W. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, act v, sc. 3, overridden by the Court's newfound right to publish unlawfully acquired information of "public concern," ante, at 525. The Court concludes that the private conversation between Gloria Bartnicki and Anthony Kane is somehow a "debate . . . . worthy of constitutional protection." Ante, at 535. Perhaps the Court is correct that "[i]f the statements about the labor negotiations had been made in a public arena —during a bargaining session, for example— they would have been newsworthy." Ante, at 525. The point, however, is that Bartnicki and Kane had no intention of contributing to a public "debate" at all, and it is perverse to hold that another's unlawful interception and knowing disclosure of their conversation is speech "worthy of constitutional protection." Cf. Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, Inc., 515 U. S. 557, 573 (1995) (" 555 [O]ne important manifestation of the principle of free speech is that one who chooses to speak may also decide `what not to say' "). The Constitution should not protect the involuntary broadcast of personal conversations. Even where the communications involve public figures or *555 concern public matters, the conversations are nonetheless private and worthy of protection. Although public persons may have forgone the right to live their lives screened from public scrutiny in some areas, it does not and should not follow that they also have abandoned their right to have a private conversation without fear of it being intentionally intercepted and knowingly disclosed. The Court's decision to hold inviolable our right to broadcast conversations of "public importance" enjoys little support in our precedents. As discussed above, given the qualified nature of their holdings, the Daily Mail cases cannot bear the weight the Court places upon them. More mystifying still is the Court's reliance upon the "Pentagon Papers" case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U. S. 713 (1971) (per curiam), which involved the United States' attempt to prevent the publication of Defense Department documents relating to the Vietnam War. In addition to involving Government controlled information, that case fell squarely under our precedents holding that prior restraints on speech bear "`a heavy presumption against . . . constitutionality.' " Id., at 714. Indeed, it was this presumption that caused Justices Stewart and White to join the 6-to-3 per curiam decision. See id., at 730-731 (White, J., joined by Stewart, J., concurring) ("I concur in today's judgments, but only because of the concededly extraordinary protection against prior restraints enjoyed by the press under our constitutional system"). By no stretch of the imagination can the statutes at issue here be dubbed "prior restraints." And the Court's "parallel reasoning" from other in apposite cases fails to persuade. Ante, at 535. Surely "the interest in individual privacy," ante, at 518, at its narrowest, must embrace the right to be free from 556 surreptitious eavesdropping on, and involuntary broadcast of, our cellular telephone conversations. The Court subordinates that right, not to the claims of those who themselves wish to speak, but to the claims of those who wish to *556 publish the intercepted conversations of others. Congress' effort to balance the above claim to privacy against a marginal claim to speak freely is thereby set at naught. [*] Together with No. 99-1728, United States v. Vopper, aka Williams, et al., also on certiorari to the same court. [*] Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association by Howard J. Symons and Michael F. Altschul; and for Representative John A. Boehner by Michael A. Carvin and David H. Thompson. Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the American Civil Liberties Union et al. by Steven Shapiro; for Dow Jones & Co., Inc., by Theodore B. Olson, Theodore J. Boutrous, Jr., and Jack M. Weiss; for the Liberty Project by Nory Miller and Julia M. Carpenter; for Media Entities and Organizations by Floyd Abrams, George Freeman, Adam Liptak, Richard A. Bernstein, Jerry S. Birenz, Henry S. Hoberman, David A. Schulz, Eve Burton, Susanna M. Lowy, Harold W. Fuson, Jr., Barbara W. Wall, Anne Noble, Kenneth Vittor, René P. Milam, Lucy Dalglish, Bruce W. Sanford, and Eric Lieberman; for WFAA—TV et al. by Laurence H. Tribe, Jonathan S. Massey, https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?q=bartnicki&hl=en&as_sdt=2006&case=2171346211086974391&scilh=0 12/15