American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper
959 F. Supp. 2d 724, 2013 WL 6819708, 59 Communications Reg. (P&F) 888 (2013)
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Rule of Law:
The government's bulk collection of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act does not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment, as individuals have no legitimate expectation of privacy in information voluntarily conveyed to third-party telecommunications providers.
Facts:
- Following the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government determined that pre-existing intelligence methods failed to detect connections between terrorists, such as calls made by hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar from San Diego to an al-Qaeda safe house.
- In response, the National Security Agency (NSA) initiated a program under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act to collect bulk telephony metadata from telecommunications providers for substantially every telephone call in the United States.
- The collected metadata included the telephone numbers placing and receiving calls, call times, and call durations, but did not include the content of conversations, subscriber names, or cell site location information.
- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a customer of Verizon, had its telephony metadata collected by the NSA as part of this program.
- The NSA stored the collected metadata in secure networks and was only permitted to 'query' the database using a specific phone number (a 'seed') after a high-ranking official found a 'reasonable articulable suspicion' that the number was associated with a foreign terrorist organization.
- The program and its legal basis were kept secret until they were revealed to the public through unauthorized disclosures by Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Procedural Posture:
- The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and affiliated organizations 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 violated the PATRIOT Act and the First and Fourth Amendments, as well as a permanent injunction to stop it.
- The ACLU moved for a preliminary injunction to halt the collection of its call records and require the quarantining of records already collected.
- The Government moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing the ACLU lacked standing and had failed to state a valid legal claim.
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Issue:
Does the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephony metadata from telecommunications providers, as authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches?
Opinions:
Majority - William H. Pauley III
No, the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephony metadata does not violate the Fourth Amendment. An individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties, a principle established in Smith v. Maryland. The court reasoned that this 'third-party doctrine' applies to telephony metadata because telephone users knowingly convey the numbers they dial to the phone company. The sheer volume of data collected by the government does not transform the collection into a constitutionally impermissible search. The court emphasized that Smith remains controlling precedent and lower courts are bound by it, rejecting the argument that technological changes since 1979 have rendered the decision obsolete for this type of data.
Analysis:
This decision represents a significant application of the pre-digital era's third-party doctrine to modern, large-scale government surveillance. By holding that the immense scale of data collection does not create a Fourth Amendment privacy interest, the court provided a legal foundation for such programs. This ruling created a stark contrast with other judicial opinions that suggested the aggregation of vast amounts of data could, in itself, implicate constitutional privacy rights, thereby contributing to a circuit split on a critical issue of 21st-century law and setting the stage for eventual Supreme Court consideration.
