Cite as: 532 U. S. 514 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
Assistant Attorney General Ogden, Deputy Solicitor General Dreeben, Jeffrey A. Lamken, and Douglas N. Letter.
Lee Levine argued the cause for respondents Vopper et al. With him on the brief was Jay Ward Brown. Thomas C. Goldstein argued the cause for respondent Yokum. With him on the brief were Erik S. Jaffe and Frank J. Aritz.*
Justice Stevens delivered the opinion of the Court.
These cases raise an important question concerning what degree of protection, if any, the First Amendment provides to speech that discloses the contents of an illegally intercepted communication. That question is both novel and narrow. Despite the fact that federal law has prohibited such disclosures since 1934,1 this is the first time that we have confronted such an issue.
The suit at hand involves the repeated intentional disclosure of an illegally intercepted cellular telephone conversation about a public issue. The persons who made the disclosures did not participate in the interception, but they did know—or at least had reason to know—that the inter-*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, William D. Sims, Jr., Thomas S. Leatherbury, and Marie R. Yeates; and for Representative James A. McDermott by Frank Cicero, Jr., Christopher Landau, and Daryl Joseffer.
1 See 48 Stat. 1069, 1103.
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