For most of us, when the “government” and “wiretapping” are mentioned in the same sentence, a couple of individual comes to mind—J. Edgar Hoover being one of them (Nixon, the other). We have all heard about “Hoover’s Secret Files” and numerous illegal microphones and wiretaps that Hoover personally signed off on. Most notably, at Hoover’s direction, the FBI gathered surveillance on JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Marilyn Monroe and the members of the mob along with over 400,000 other Americans! Needless to say, the government—illegal or legal—has been intercepting, surveilling and eavesdropping on people’s communications since the invention of the telephone in 1876 and not just to conduct criminal investigations as we all know.
Overtime, federal and state laws have been created to protect American citizens against unlawful government intrusions and to protect our constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. There are procedures that law enforcement must follow in order to tap a person’s telephone or gather other communications via electronic surveillance.
