Cite as: 532 U. S. 514 (2001)
Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting
ory is both logical and eminently reasonable, and our precedents make plain that it is "far stronger than mere speculation." United States v. Treasury Employees, 513 U. S. 454, 475 (1995).
These statutes also protect the important interests of deterring clandestine invasions of privacy and preventing the involuntary broadcast of private communications. Over a century ago, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis recognized that "[t]he intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual." The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193, 196 (1890). "There is necessarily, and within suitably defined areas, a . . . freedom not to speak publicly, one which serves the same ultimate end as freedom of speech in its affirmative aspect." Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U. S. 539, 559 (1985) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). One who speaks into a phone "is surely entitled to 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 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
553
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