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by zamadatix 492 days ago
Whether it is actually a crime for a person in a one-party consent jurisdiction recording a call with a person in a two-party consent jurisdiction is not a consistently settled issue. At least in US courts, dunno about elsewhere.

Sometimes the courts have sided "the stricter jurisdiction's law applies" while other times the courts have sided "the law where the recording was made applies". The federal law is not any clearer, stating one party consent is the default and states can override but offering no further guidance. I suspect this will someday be addressed in the Supreme Court.

1 comments

If one state could make something illegal in the other 49 Florida would have already made life very painful for the blue states.
Extraterritorial effects are usually limited in scope for this kind of concern. If I had to place a bet I'd say this is the main line of reasoning the current Supreme Court would use to side with the "the law where the recording happens" as well. I may just be advertising my biased though, as that's also the conclusion I think makes sense personally.

Until that actually gets reviewed by a higher court (or more descript higher law comes about) what each regional court concludes remains the reality for cases in that region though.

I'm not a lawyer myself, I just had to spend some time with the company's regarding this topic recently ("yay" for filling in to manage internal IT on the side).