546
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
cases in Florida Star made clear, three other unique factors also informed the scope of the Daily Mail principle.
First, the information published by the newspapers had been lawfully obtained from the government itself.3 "Where information is entrusted to the government, a less drastic means than punishing truthful publication almost always exists for guarding against the dissemination of private facts." Florida Star, supra, at 534. See, e. g., Landmark Communications, supra, at 841, and n. 12 (noting that the State could have taken steps to protect the confidentiality of its proceedings, such as holding in contempt commission members who breached their duty of confidentiality). Indeed, the State's ability to control the information undermined the claim that the restriction was necessary, for "[b]y placing the information in the public domain on official court records, the State must be presumed to have concluded that the public interest was thereby being served." Cox Broadcasting, supra, at 495. This factor has no relevance in the present cases, where we deal with private conversations that have been intentionally kept out of the public domain.
Second, the information in each case was already "publicly available," and punishing further dissemination would not have advanced the purported government interests of confidentiality. Florida Star, supra, at 535. Such is not the case here. These statutes only prohibit "disclos[ure]," 18 U. S. C. § 2511(1)(c); 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. § 5703(2) (2000), and one cannot "disclose" what is already in the public domain. See Black's Law Dictionary 477 (7th ed. 1999) (defining "dis-closure" as "[t]he act or process of making known something that was previously unknown; a revelation of facts");
3 The one exception was Daily Mail, where reporters obtained the juvenile defendant's name from witnesses to the crime. See 443 U. S., at 99. However, the statute at issue there imposed a blanket prohibition on the publication of the information. See id., at 98-99. In contrast, these anti-disclosure provisions do not prohibit publication so long as the information comes from a legal source.
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