Mr. Beat presents Supreme Court Briefs Los Angeles, California, February 25, 1965 Charles Katz makes a phone call at a public telephone booth near his apartment on Sunset Boulevard. Wait, Mr. Beat. What the heck is a public telephone booth? Geez do I feel old. Ok, so...
Public telephone booths. A long time ago, before cell phones, public telephone booths were little structures where you entered and you made a phone call after inserting some money, and it was connected to a landline, a telephone line. telephone line connected to other telephones all over the place.
Oh, and public telephone booths could also double as time machines. Anyway, Katz made these calls to various states regularly for years. He was a professional gambler, mostly placing bets on college basketball games, and he would conduct his gambling business on these payphones.
Well, wouldn't you know it, interstate sports gambling was illegal, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, aka the FBI, was spying on him. Yep, they were recording his conversations after installing hidden listening devices attached to the outside of the phone booth. Shortly after recording these conversations, the FBI arrested him at his apartment.
They charged him with eight counts of knowingly transmitting wagering information by phone between US states. But there was one big problem. with the FBI's plan. The agents had not secured a search warrant before spying on cats, and the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution states that unless law enforcement officers have probable cause, they need a warrant to spy on a suspect.
Wait, do they? Well, perhaps the agents were not that worried, since in the case Almstead v. United States, the Supreme Court said that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to wiretapping phones to listen in on conversations. In fact, the Court determined that private phone conversations were basically no different from conversations overheard in a public area.
Unless there was physical intrusion by law enforcement, it was okay, and this became known as the Trespass Doctrine. So... Sorry Katz, but wait a second.
The Olmstead case was 37 years prior. Times had changed. Katz was like, I'm fighting this. In the US District Court for the Southern District of California, he tried to prevent the FBI's phone booth recordings from being used as evidence since, ya know, they didn't have a warrant.
The judge denied the request, and Katz was convicted based on them. With the help of a young lawyer named Harvey Snyder, Katz appealed his conviction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, but it agreed with the lower court. So Katz appealed again to the Supreme Court and they agreed to hear oral arguments on October 17, 1967. The biggest issue was, did Katz deserve privacy by stepping into the phone booth to make those calls? Before we find out how the court decided, I want to thank this video's sponsor, Babbel, the world's number one language learning app.
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Ok, so did cats deserve privacy in that phone booth? The court said yes. On December 18, 1967, it announced it had sided with cats.
It was 7-1, so yep. The Court overruled the Olmstead case and therefore overruled the Trespass Doctrine. Justice Potter Stewart wrote the opinion, quote, Katz has strenuously argued that the Booth was a, quote, constitutionally protected area. The government has maintained with equal vigor that it was not, but this effort to decide whether or not a given, quote, area viewed in the abstract is, quote, constitutionally protect- deflects attention for the problem presented by this case. For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.
What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection, but what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be protected. be constitutionally protected."In other words, the Court ruled that privacy for American citizens had now extended beyond the home, and it expanded privacy into the electronic age. Justice John Marshall Harlan II even described a test to attempt to identify a reasonable expectation of privacy. Katz v. United States might just be the most important Supreme Court case to ever look at privacy and really attempt to answer that question, what is privacy. Today, despite the Katz decision, Americans don't have as much privacy. The federal government regularly conducts mass surveillance without warrants over citizens. This is what led to Edward Snowden speaking out back in 2013. But while most Americans don't seem that bothered by the fact that their own government or corporations spy on them, it's hard to deny the troublesome implications of mass surveillance. This is, after all, what George Orwell's 1984 was supposed to warn us all about. Big Brother is always watching, and it's why the Katz decision remains so gosh darn important. And it probably ought to be revisited. I'll see you for the next Supreme Court case, jury. So what do you think? Is Big Brother watching? Did you just commit a thought crime? But seriously, do you think the Katz decision should be expanded since the technology has dramatically changed since 1967? I'd love to hear from you in the comments. Let me know. Also, any other Supreme Court case suggestions, I'll take them. And if you didn't know about this, I now have a P.O. box. You can actually mail me, snail mail me, physical stuff. So mail me some stuff and I'll share it with the world. The address is in the description and pinned comment. And thanks for watching, Big Brother!