Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself … To declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.
—Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 1928,
in Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, (New York, Doubleday, 2008), 213.
