So I’m sitting in my apartment, listening to the daily occurrence of my upstairs neighbor screaming on her phone so loudly I can hear her clearly. That made me wonder something: if I started recording on my iPad, and it caught her voice coming through my ceiling, could I run afoul of wiretapping laws if I were in a state where such is illegal? What if she admitted to a felony? Would any of it be admissible evidence? What if I focused on, say, my bookshelf, saying I was recording the contents of my apartment for insurance purposes, and I “just happened” to pick up the above on my recording because of the volume of her voice?
Heck, I’m not 100% sure she is on her phone, but I only ever hear her, so I’m assuming she is. What if I said I didn’t think she was on the phone? Would that change anything?
My WAG is how a judge/jury/the law would feel about your expectation of privacy when you’re yelling loud enough to be heard from one apartment to another. Some quick googling suggests that you can record a random conversation, outdoors, that you’re not part of, where people have no expectation of privacy (similar to taking their picture). Would that apply here?
It would probably help even more if you called called the landlord and/or police and/or talked to her directly to let her know that you can hear her and would like her to quite down (and noted someone when you did this). Then, if anything were to become of it, you’d have some kind of record that she knows, because she’s been told, that her neighbors can hear her just fine. IMO, her expectation of privacy would be greatly diminished now. She may have been able to argue before that she didn’t realize others could hear her, but she can’t now.
I still don’t know what the law would say, and you’d probably want to talk to a lawyer before you’d do anything with any hypothetical recordings (or use them anonymously), but reporting her, IMHO, would strengthen your case. Also, doing it through a third party helps make the case even stronger and if there’s more than just you and her there (so not just a duplex/triplex), she won’t know who you are.
Also, if you just want her to shut up, that’s a much better way to go about it. Neighbor wars escalate really fast.
I have worked in countermeasures for a few years and we tend to distinguish between “wiretapping” and “eavesdropping.” The former is normally used when a telephone (landline, cell, intercom, etc.) call is intercepted. The latter is used when oral communications are monitored using a microphone or similar method. Given your description of the situation, recording oral communications would be eavesdropping. (This is not a hard and fast rule, BTW.)
IANAL, so I will avoid the whole expectation of privacy issue. But you could easily end up spending a few dollars defending yourself from a lawsuit, whether it really has any merit or not.