Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Law That Decides When You Can Press Record in New Hampshire

RSA 570-A took effect 57 years ago today. It can turn a voice memo into a felony charge, it lets the state record you a dozen different ways, and public officials keep getting it wrong.

Press record on a phone call in New Hampshire without the other side’s permission and you have committed a crime. Record a conversation you are not part of and the crime is a class B felony, the same grade the criminal code assigns to second-degree assault, with up to seven years of prison exposure attached.

The law drawing those lines is RSA 570-A, the state’s wiretapping and eavesdropping chapter. It took effect on August 31, 1969, when an interception meant alligator clips on a phone line. Fifty-seven years later it governs a state where every pocket carries a recorder, and it does two jobs at once. It tells private people when they may record one another, which is almost never without everyone’s consent. And it builds the machinery the government uses to record you, court-ordered wiretaps down to the school bus microphone.

Getting the chapter wrong has a price. The town of Weare paid $57,500 for it. A Gilford budget meeting once stopped cold over it.

One chapter, two crimes

RSA 570-A:2 splits illegal recording into two offenses, sorted by who is holding the recorder. The felony, paragraph I, covers anyone who wilfully intercepts a telecommunication or a private oral communication “without the consent of all parties to the communication.” It reaches past the act itself to anyone who knowingly discloses or uses what an illegal interception produced. The misdemeanor, paragraph I-a, covers the more common sin: a person who records a conversation they are part of, or records with one participant’s blessing, without the official approval the chapter reserves for law enforcement.

The word intercept does heavy lifting: the chapter defines it to include recording a communication’s contents with any device, so the voice-memo app on your phone qualifies, and so does the audio track riding under a video.

The two words that decide everything

The chapter protects “oral communication,” and its definition is where most of the fights start:

No reasonable expectation, no protected communication, no crime. A quiet conversation in your kitchen sits inside the statute. A speech to a crowded room does not. Most of what follows, from the arrests to the doorbell disputes, turns on which side of that line a set of spoken words lands.

What the chapter cannot touch

Start with the setting New Hampshire officials get wrong most often: the public meeting. The Right-to-Know Law, RSA 91-A:2, II, says any person shall be “permitted to use recording devices” at open meetings, cameras and recorders included. No consent, no announcement, no permission slip. The wiretap law never enters the room.

Officials forget. In February 2017, the chairman of the Gilford Budget Committee, Norman Silber, halted a public meeting to warn a Laconia Daily Sun reporter that taping the discussion without each speaker’s consent was a felony, the paper reported. He had reached for the wrong statute. The meeting was open to the public, RSA 91-A:2 controlled, and no consent was required from anyone.

The second setting is the one that made national law: police at work in public. In March 2010, Carla Gericke tried to film a late-night traffic stop in Weare. Officers arrested her and charged felony wiretapping, among other counts; prosecutors dropped everything, and she sued. In May 2014 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, whose rulings bind New Hampshire, held she had been exercising a clearly established First Amendment right to film officers performing their duties in public, traffic stops included, and stripped the officers of qualified immunity. Weare settled weeks later for $57,500, the Associated Press reported.

The First Circuit had said much the same three years earlier in Glik v. Cunniffe, a Boston case about filming an arrest on the Common. Gericke v. Begin extended the right to traffic stops and put every New Hampshire department on notice: openly recording officers doing public work is protected activity, subject only to reasonable, safety-based restrictions in the moment. That shield is constitutional, not statutory, and it covers open recording of public officials on the job. It is not a license to secretly tape anyone, anywhere.

The government’s side of the ledger

Read paragraph II of RSA 570-A:2 and the chapter’s real architecture shows itself. The consent rule binds you. Then come thirteen lettered exceptions, most of them written for the state.

The largest is one-party interception by police. Under subparagraphs (d) and (e), an officer investigating the chapter’s listed offenses may record a conversation with only one participant’s consent, so long as the attorney general, the deputy, or a designated assistant finds reasonable suspicion that the recording will produce evidence of a crime. The sign-off can be verbal, papered with a memo within 72 hours and kept on file at the attorney general’s office. For drug cases that power can be delegated down to county attorneys and their assistants. What would be your misdemeanor becomes their investigative tool with a phone call.

The rest of the list reads like an inventory of every microphone the state has bolted on since 1969: cruiser cameras on routine stops, with notice to the driver when practicable; recorders wired to Tasers, with a copy owed to the person on the receiving end; police body cameras under RSA 105-D, added by a 2016 law; school bus audio, if the school board holds a public hearing, authorizes it, posts a sign on the bus, and erases recordings within ten school days unless a disciplinary case needs them; 911 and emergency dispatch lines; utility dispatch calls, which must carry a repeating warning tone. The list has been amended so many times it now repeats itself. Subparagraphs (c) and (g) are word-for-word identical.

Full wiretaps, the kind requiring a judge, live in sections 7 through 10. Only the attorney general’s office, or a county attorney with its written approval, may ask a superior court judge for an interception order, and only for a listed menu of offenses: homicide, kidnapping, drug dealing, arson, robbery, sexual assault, organized crime and more. The judge must find probable cause and that normal investigative methods failed or would fail. Orders run ten days at most, with extensions only by fresh application, and the recordings are sealed and kept for ten years. One quirk of the 1969 drafting survives: New Hampshire judges report every state wiretap order to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, a federal office, and the attorney general folds a wiretap count into a report to lawmakers every other year.

Stingrays got their own section

In 2017 the legislature added RSA 570-A:2-a to govern cell site simulators, the devices that impersonate a cell tower and trick every phone in range into reporting its location and identity. Using one to locate or track a person’s phone requires that person’s informed consent, a particularized warrant built on probable cause, or a recognized warrant exception. Data swept from bystanders must be deleted by the end of the day it was collected; data on the target goes within 30 days once it stops looking like evidence. Violations are a class A misdemeanor carrying a fine of up to $10,000.

The teeth

The felony carries the seven-year maximum New Hampshire attaches to class B felonies under RSA 651:2. Devices built primarily for surreptitious interception are their own class B felony to make, sell or possess, and the state can seize them. The chapter’s sharpest teeth, though, are evidentiary and civil.

Section 6 is an exclusionary rule with unusual reach: contents intercepted in violation of the chapter, and any evidence derived from them, are barred from every state proceeding, courts, agencies and legislative committees alike. The New Hampshire Supreme Court just narrowed it. In State v. Clark, decided November 13, 2024, a complainant in a criminal threatening case had recorded the defendant’s statements without his consent, a participant recording, and the defendant moved to suppress. The court held that suppression under section 6 is triggered only by felony-grade violations, and that whether a one-party recording rises to the felony turns on the recorder’s mental state. Under Fischer v. Hooper, the 1999 case that still supplies the standard, wilful means intentional or reckless disregard for the lawfulness of your own conduct; a good-faith belief the recording was legal defeats the felony.

Then there is section 11. Anyone whose communication is illegally intercepted, disclosed or used can sue the person who did it and collect actual damages with a floor of $100 per day of violation or $1,000, whichever is higher, plus punitive damages and attorney’s fees. Fischer shows how that plays out: a jury made an ex-husband pay $10,000 under this chapter, and $15,000 more for invasion of privacy, for secretly taping his ex-wife’s phone calls with their daughter during a custody fight.

Rules to live by

• Ask before you record a call. Consent can be implied, and the state’s high court has treated knowingly speaking into technology you know is recording as consent. But proving what somebody impliedly agreed to is a courtroom fight. Asking out loud is free.
• Mind the state line. In State v. Ruggiero, the state Supreme Court held an interception happens where the person recording sits, so a call recorded in South Carolina did not violate New Hampshire’s chapter even though the other voice was here. The mirror image is the trap: your Granite State habits can break another state’s law the moment you record someone standing in it. Press-freedom guides tell journalists to follow the strictest state on the call.
• Treat audio-capable cameras as unsettled ground. A superior court judge in a 2020 Rochester shooting case admitted Ring doorbell audio as evidence, the Union Leader reported, but a trial-court order binds nobody else, and a camera that routinely captures the neighbors’ conversations is exactly what this chapter polices.
• Record any public meeting you want. RSA 91-A:2, II is your permission slip, and no board chair can revoke it.
• Record police in public, openly. Keep a reasonable distance and stay out of the way. Openly is the operative word; the cases protect visible recording, and New Hampshire’s courts have not settled how the statute treats secret recording of officers.

The pressure to change it

New Hampshire is one of roughly a dozen states that still require every party’s consent, and the all-party rule takes fire in Concord nearly every session. Lawmakers voted down a bill to flip the state to one-party consent in 2024, New Hampshire Public Radio reported. A 2025 bill proposed a carve-out for recordings capturing evidence of a crime; the chapter’s exception list still ends where it did, at body cameras.

This January the argument returned as HB 1508, from Rep. Joseph Barton, a first-term Littleton Republican who has held leadership roles with Project Veritas, the group built on surreptitious recording. His bill would have let anyone secretly record audio and video, with a ban on using the recordings for blackmail or harassment. “One-party consent, it’s a service to the public,” he told the House Judiciary Committee, per NHPR. The committee voted 15-1 that same afternoon to recommend killing the bill, and the full House finished the job by voice vote on February 5. The text on the books today reads the way it read when the session opened: all parties, or no recording.

The line worth memorizing

Fifty-seven years in, RSA 570-A draws one line worth knowing cold. The government’s need to listen is treated as a regulated exception, thirteen carve-outs and a warrant procedure deep. A private citizen’s urge to record is treated as a presumptive crime, with the presumption reversed in exactly the places accountability needs it most: the open meeting, and the public officer at work in public view. Learn which side of that line your thumb is on before you press the button. The town of Weare can tell you what the tuition costs.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every statutory claim above was checked against the current chapter text published by the New Hampshire General Court, and case holdings against the opinions cited in the fact-check table. The Weare settlement figure is as reported by the Associated Press; the 2017 Gilford meeting account is as reported by the Laconia Daily Sun. This article explains a criminal statute in general terms and is not legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.