The problem for ACORN is that, as a matter of law, the employees at ACORN had no reasonable expectation of privacy in what they said to members of the public who entered their offices. As made clear by Katz v. United States and its progeny (made applicable specifically to the Maryland Wiretap Act by cases such as Malpas v. State, 695 A.2d 588, 595 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1997)), “What a person exposes knowingly to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection.”

Get that? The conversations in question were knowingly exposed in a place of business to two customers who walked in off the streets. There is and can be absolutely no expectation of privacy for the ACORN employees in question. As such, the conversations are not “private conversations” under the Maryland Wiretap Act as a matter of law. I found all this in a matter of 15 minutes on Lexis. I’m sure another 15 (which I don’t have) will find numerous directly applicable precedents under Katz that are completely factually indistinguishable from the present case.