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Law

Once the cameras had been installed, agents say, they observed some of the defendants constructing time bombs. The four were arrested in June 1983 on seditious-conspiracy and weapons charges when the FBI learned that they allegedly

cis Lynch, then chief of detectives of the Woonsocket, R.I., police department, got a strange call. "You may think I'm crazy," said an excited young woman, "but there is some guy dealing drugs, and I can hear it on my radio." Lynch was skeptical, but he sent two detectives to the woman's house.

It turned out that the transmissions that the woman had heard on her AM radio were coming from a nearby home whose occupant, Leo DeLaurier, owned a cordless telephone. DeLaurier was apparently unaware that such devices are little more than short-range radio transmitters whose signals can sometimes be picked up by ordinary radio receivers. During the next month, the police say, they recorded more than 100 hours of incriminating conversations by DeLaurier about the sale of cocaine and marijuana. Then they arrested DeLaurier, his wife and 22 other people on drug charges. DeLaurier objected to the use of the tapes, and his trial has been postponed pending the outcome of an appeal to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. DeLaurier argues that the monitoring of his phone was an illegal invasion of his privacy since it was done by the police without a warrant.

Legal experts point out that cordless phones are one of many new-age technological devices that fall into a legal no man's land, an ambiguous region inhabited by such consumer products as personal computers and the ubiquitous message beepers and by sophisticated police equipment like mini-video cameras. The lack of clear legal rules for police use of the equipment promises to keep the courts busy. Just last month two federal courts clashed on the issue when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago overruled a federal district court and found that video surveillance of four suspected members of the Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN did not violate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Says University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone: "Technology-bugs, beepers that police attach to cars, parabolic microphones-all of this enables the Government to invade privacy in ways far more extreme than one could possibly have imagined when the Fourth Amendment was written."

The Kansas Supreme Court was the first state high court to rule on the cordless-phone issue, holding last March that those who use such phones are broadcast

reasonable expectation of privacy," a finding that may surprise the 7 million or so owners of the popular instruments. But to rule otherwise, Rhode Island's attorneys argued before that state's supreme court, could mean that the woman who inadvertently overheard DeLaurier's conversations might be held criminally liable for violating the federal wiretapping law.

DeLaurier's lawyer, however, asserted that this 1968 legislation, which forbids wiretapping without court authorization, does apply to cordless phones, since the statute defines a "wire communication" as any conversation that is carried "in whole or in part" by wire. Even cordless instruments must utilize regular phone lines at some point to transmit calls.

Video surveillance is as knotty an issue as the new telephones. Abscam, the De Lorean drug investigation and other wellpublicized "sting" operations have made it seem that police have broad authority to videotape criminal activity. In fact, cameras have usually been employed to record only those meetings where an undercover agent or informer with prior knowledge of the filming is also in the room. This was not the situation in the Chicago FALN case, in which the FBI had authorization for both audio and video surveillance from a

federal judge. The agency resorted to the

video surveillance of two "safe house" apartments after two of the four suspects successfully thwarted wiretaps and bugs.

blowing up military installations.

U.S. District Judge George Leighton threw out the FBI's 130 hours of videotape evidence in 1984, saying that "no one, not even in the name of ferreting out crime, has the right to invade the privacy of a home" without proper legal authority. He ruled that the 1968 wiretap law provided no such authority because it says nothing

ATION FOR TIME BY BOB GALE

about video surveillance. The Seventh Circuit panel, in an opinion written by Supreme Court Hopeful Richard Posner, held that the wiretap law did not apply but found that video surveillance is permitted under the Constitution without specific legislative approval. Paraphrasing a famous dissent by Justice Louis Brandeis, Posner wrote, "There is no right to be let alone while assembling bombs in safe houses." The accused FALN members plan to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Many legal observers are frightened by the prospect of widespread video surveillance. Raising the specter of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Big Brother, Herman Schwartz, a law professor at American University, denounces it as "very dangerous" to everyone's civil liberties. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe cautions that technological innovations like video cameras may be rendering the traditional protections of the Fourth Amendment "irrelevant." Columbia University Law Professor

Richard Uviller, a former prosecutor, says of the new high-tech snooping, "When there is no alternative, when the crime is terror, there is a strong lawenforcement need for this." But he adds that "its uses should be reserved for only the most serious circumstances: kidnaping, murder, espionage and terrorism."

To clarify the legal muddle, several federal statutes have been proposed, including one by Wisconsin Congressman Robert Kastenmeier that would force police to satisfy a series of strict requirements in order to get a warrant for video prying. Though the Kastenmeier bill died in the last Congress, it will be re introduced in this session. Judges, legisla tors and civil libertarians agree that the privacy problems presented by technological changes make necessary a new as sessment of existing statutes and court rules. Warns John Shattuck, a former American Civil Liberties Union official "In many ways, technology is now out

stripping the law."

-By Michael S. Serr Reported by Carol Fletcher/Chicago Timothy Loughran/New York

TIME, JANUARY 14, 1