A 1992 political espionage case involved a cellular telephone conversation recorded and subsequently played on a national television program, destroying two candidates' presidential campaigns. The army acknowledged that an army captain had "misused" its espionage equipment to record a private conversation and leak it to the media. The Supreme Court ruled that the law on telephone intercepts only covered conversations carried on wire, not on cellular telephones, and ordered the defendants freed of all charges. The military courts punished the army captain only for neglect of duty, but he was discharged from the army in November 1993.