Klayman v. Obama is a case of American federal court on the legality of a massive collection of Internet phone and Internet metadata by the United States.
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An ongoing news report in the international media has revealed operational details about the US National Security Agency (NSA) and its international partners' global oversight of foreign nationals and American citizens. The report comes from a cache of confidential documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. On June 6, 2013, Snowden's first document published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian, attracted considerable public attention. Shortly after the disclosure, plaintiff Larry Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, Charles Strange and Mary Strange, Michael Strange's parents, a cryptologist technician for the NSA and support personnel for the Navy Seal Team VI killed in Afghanistan, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a mass metadata collection of telephone records ( Klayman I ). Plaintiffs joining Michael Ferrari and Matt Garrison filed a second lawsuit on June 12, 2013 challenging the constitutionality of a mass metadata collection of telephone and Internet communications ( Klayman II ).
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Archiving
In Klayman I , the plaintiff, Verizon Wireless's customer, filed a lawsuit against the NSA, the Justice Department, Verizon Communications, President Barack Obama, Eric Holder, US Attorney General and General Keith B Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency. The plaintiffs alleged that the government was pursuing a "secret and illegal government scheme to intercept a large number of domestic telephone communications" and that the program violated the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and exceeded the legal authority granted by Section 215. In Klayman II , the plaintiff sued the same government defendant and in addition, Facebook, Yahoo !, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Sprint, AT & amp; T, Apple again accuses the collection of bulk metadata infringes First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments and is a disclosure of communications records that violate Section 2702 of the Stored Communications Act.
Order
On December 16, 2013, US Federal Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that a large collection of American phone metadata is likely to violate the Fourth Amendment. The judge wrote,
I can not imagine a more 'arbitrary' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech data collection and storage of almost every single citizen for the purpose of questioning and analyzing it without prior judicial consent... Of course, such a program violating the 'privacy level' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
Leon, the first judge who examined the NSA program outside the secret FISA court on behalf of the non-criminal defendant, described the technology used as "almost Orwellian", referring to the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four where the world was under government oversight everywhere. In a 68 page ruling, Leon said that he has "serious doubts about the efficacy" of the program. The US government can not quote "an instance where the mass NSA metadata mass analysis analysis actually halts an imminent attack, or otherwise helps the government in achieving any time-sensitive goal."
The judge ruled that the 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland , which stipulates that telephone metadata not subject to the Fourth Amendment, does not apply to the NSA program as the US Department of Justice believes. He calls the use of telephony metadata in Smith v. Maryland as a short-term forward looking for capture and that the NSA as a long-term retrospective historical analysis . Citing the broad coverage of the NSA and "the development of the role of mobile and technology", Judge Leon's opinion indicates that the Fourth Amendment needs to adapt to the digital era.Calter Leon remains in power, giving the US government six months to file an appeal.
Rationale
In its analysis, the court found that plaintiffs had stood up to challenge the mass telephone metadata program because their fear of surveillance was not just speculative. Being Verizon's customers, their data was collected by the NSA as evidenced by the leaked FISC orders that ordered Verizon to provide daily, business records to the NSA. Although the court found no evidence that plaintiffs' data were being analyzed or evidence of their allegation that the government was behind the phone calls and unexplained text messages sent to and received from their phone numbers, Judge Leon stated that he had reason to believe that the metadata everyone is being analyzed, because the way the query process works. He argues that for a foreign phone number that the NSA might not have collected metadata, there is no way to ask what number has been contacted other than to match it with every phone number in the database. He wrote,
Because the Government may use daily metadata collection to engage in recurrent and silent surveillance of the private actions of citizens, the NSA database implies a Fourth Amendment whenever a government official monitors it.
The plaintiffs did not set out to stand up to challenge the PRISM program that primarily targeted Internet communications of non-US citizens believed to be outside the US. The plaintiffs provide no evidence that being US citizens of their internet communications are being observed or they allege that they are communicating with anyone outside the US. In addition, the government has stopped collecting Internet metadata since 2011, so the court does not consider the legality of the program further.
Reaction
At the decision, The Washington Post printed: "NSA officials... are now charged with leading a program whose capabilities are considered by the judge to be 'Orwellian' and possibly illegal."
Edward Snowden issued a statement in response to the decision, saying partly:
I am acting on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance program will not stand the constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserves an opportunity to see these issues determined by an open trial. Today, a secret program passed by a secret tribunal, when exposed to daylight, is found to violate the rights of Americans. This is the first of many.
Case development
In 2015, the Circuit Court of Appeal D.C cleared the order and stated that the plaintiff failed to meet the increased burden of evidence related to the position required for the preliminary injunction. The case was returned to the district court. Then in 2015, the district court ordered the NSA to collect data about clients of Klayman, a California lawyer who had recently been added to the lawsuit, but Circuit D.C court still imposed the order.
In November 2017, Judge Richard Leon rejected the lawsuit against the government because Klayman failed to prove that he or his client had stood up.
See also
- Litigation over global surveillance
- ACLU v. Clapper
References
External links
- Legal Tracker of NSA Pro Publica "
- Initial complaints
- Justia's Documentation and Submission: Klayman v. Obama et al
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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