524
Opinion of the Court
oral communications; and subsection (e) prohibited the unauthorized disclosure of the contents of interceptions that were authorized for law enforcement purposes. Subsection (c), the original version of the provision most directly at issue in this suit, applied to any person who "willfully discloses, or endeavors to disclose, to any other person the contents of any wire or oral communication, knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire or oral communication in violation of this subsection." The oral communications protected by the Act were only those "uttered by a person exhibiting an expectation that such communication is not subject to interception under circumstances justifying such expectation." § 2510(2).
As enacted in 1968, Title III did not apply to the monitoring of radio transmissions. In the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 100 Stat. 1848, however, Congress enlarged the coverage of Title III to prohibit the interception of "electronic" as well as oral and wire communications. By reason of that amendment, as well as a 1994 amendment which applied to cordless telephone communications, 108 Stat. 4279, Title III now applies to the interception of conversations over both cellular and cordless phones.7 Although a lesser criminal penalty may apply to the interception of such transmissions, the same civil remedies are available whether the communication was "oral," "wire," or "electronic," as defined by 18 U. S. C. § 2510 (1994 ed. and Supp. V).
IV
The constitutional question before us concerns the validity of the statutes as applied to the specific facts of these cases. Because of the procedural posture of these cases, it is appropriate to make certain important assumptions about those
7 See, e. g., Nix v. O'Malley, 160 F. 3d 343, 346 (CA6 1998); McKamey v. Roach, 55 F. 3d 1236, 1240 (CA6 1995).
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