American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper
2013 WL 6819708, 59 Communications Reg. (P&F) 888, 959 F. Supp. 2d 724 (2013)
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Rule of Law:
The government's bulk collection of telephony metadata does not constitute a "search" under the Fourth Amendment because individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information they voluntarily provide to third parties, such as telephone companies.
Facts:
- Prior to the September 11th attacks, the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted calls from hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego to an al-Qaeda safe house in Yemen but could not identify his U.S. location because they lacked his phone number identifier (metadata).
- Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government, using authority from Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, initiated a program to collect bulk telephony metadata from telecommunications providers.
- The program involved collecting metadata for substantially every telephone call made to, from, or within the United States, including the originating and receiving numbers, and the time, date, and duration of the call.
- The collected metadata did not include the content of any communication, the names or addresses of the parties, or cell site location information.
- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliates were subscribers to Verizon and other telecommunications providers, and their telephony metadata was collected as part of this program.
- The NSA stored the collected metadata in a secure database and was only permitted to query it using a specific phone number (a "seed") after an analyst determined there was a "reasonable articulable suspicion" that the number was associated with a foreign terrorist organization.
- The existence of the program became public knowledge through the unauthorized disclosure of a classified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) order by former government contractor Edward Snowden.
Procedural Posture:
- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliates filed a lawsuit against James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and other government officials in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
- The ACLU sought a declaratory judgment that the NSA's metadata collection program was unlawful and a permanent injunction to stop it.
- The ACLU filed a motion for a preliminary injunction to bar the government from collecting its call records during the pendency of the action.
- The Government filed a motion to dismiss the complaint for lack of standing and for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.
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Issue:
Does the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures?
Opinions:
Majority - Pauley III, District Judge
No, the NSA's bulk telephony metadata collection program does not violate the Fourth Amendment. The court is bound by the Supreme Court's precedent in Smith v. Maryland, which established the third-party doctrine. Under this doctrine, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily conveyed to a third party. Telephone users voluntarily convey dialing, routing, and addressing information to their service providers to connect a call. The court found that the metadata collected by the NSA is the same type of non-content information addressed in Smith. The breathtaking scale of the collection does not transform it from a non-search into a search under existing Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. The court also dismissed the ACLU's statutory claim, reasoning that Congress precluded such challenges and, in the alternative, ratified the program by repeatedly reauthorizing Section 215 while being aware of its implementation. The First Amendment claim also fails because any chilling effect on association is based on a speculative fear of government review, which is insufficient to establish a constitutional violation.
Analysis:
This decision represents a traditionalist application of the third-party doctrine from Smith v. Maryland to the modern technological context of mass data collection. It created a deep judicial split, as it directly contradicted another district court's finding in Klayman v. Obama that the program was likely unconstitutional. The ruling underscores the significant deference courts often grant the executive branch in matters of national security and highlights the tension between decades-old legal precedents and the privacy implications of new surveillance technologies. The decision signaled that, absent intervention from the Supreme Court or new legislation, the Fourth Amendment offered little protection against the government's large-scale acquisition of metadata held by private companies.
