Klayman v. Obama, 957 F.Supp.2d 1 (D.D.C., 2013), was a decision by the United States District Court for District of Columbia finding that the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk phone metadata collection program was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment. The ruling was later overturned on jurisdictional grounds, leaving the constitutional implications of NSA surveillance unaddressed.
Background The lawsuit arose in the wake of disclosures by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealing a system of global surveillance by the NSA and its international partners. In one particular revelation, The Guardian reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, at the request of the NSA, had ordered Verizon to hand over several months' worth of personal communications records for many of its customers. The phone numbers of both parties on a call were handed over, as was the call's location, time, and duration. Shortly after the disclosures, conservative activist Larry Klayman, along with several co-plaintiffs, filed suit and named the Obama Administration as the defendant. In a complaint known as Klayman I, Klayman sued on behalf of Verizon Wireless customers against the NSA, the Department of Justice, Verizon Communications, President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and NSA Director General Keith B. Alexander. This complaint alleged that the NSA communications surveillance constituted a search of each customer's personal data, and thus required a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. In the Klayman II complaint, Klayman sued the same government defendants as well as Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Sprint, AT&T, and Apple under the allegation that those companies collaborated with the NSA to hand over data during the surveillance program. In addition to the constitutional argument, this complaint added an allegation of a violation of Section 2702 of the Stored Communications Act. Klayman and his co-plaintiffs also alleged that the government was behind inexplicable phone calls and text messages sent to and from their phone numbers.
District court ruling The case was heard at the United States District Court for District of Columbia, combining the Klayman I and Klayman II complaints. On December 16, 2013, Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that bulk collection of American telephone metadata likely violates the Fourth Amendment. Leon wrote:
I cannot imagine a more "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval [...] Surely, such a program infringes on "that degree of privacy" that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Leon, the first judge to examine an NSA program outside of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) on behalf of a non-criminal suspect, described the technology used as "almost Orwellian", referring to the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Leon stated that he had "serious doubts about the efficacy" of the program, because the government was unable to cite "a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive." Leon ruled that a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that the NSA often cited as justification for its surveillance, Smith v. Maryland (which established that phone metadata is not subject to the Fourth Amendment), did not apply to the NSA program. He termed the use of telephone metadata in Smith v. Maryland as "short-term forward looking capture" and that of NSA as "long-term historical retrospective analysis." Citing the NSA's vast scope and "the evolving role of phones and technology," Leon's opinion pointed out that the Fourth Amendment needs to adapt to the digital age. In his analysis, Leon rejected the government's argument that the plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge the bulk telephony metadata program. Instead, their fear of being surveilled was not merely speculative. Therefore, the plaintiffs had a substantial likelihood of success on their Fourth Amendment arguments. This was supported by a leaked FISC document stating that Verizon had been ordered to provide customer communication data and business records on a regular basis. Thus, the NSA surveillance constituted a search of each person's data. which in turn required a warrant per the Fourth Amendment. Although Leon did not find any evidence that plaintiffs' data in particular was being analyzed, he declared that he had reason to believe that everyone's metadata was being analyzed due to the NSA's own descriptions of its programs. In Leon's words, "Because the Government can use daily metadata collection to engage in repetitive, surreptitious surveillance of a citizen's private goings on, the NSA database implicates the Fourth Amendment each time a government official monitors it." Thus, the NSA surveillance program was declared unconstitutional. Leon dismissed some portions of Klayman's complaints due to lack of evidence or standing, including allegations of the surveillance of foreign nationals via the PRISM program, while the particular NSA program at issue had been discontinued in 2011 so its legality did not need to be addressed. While his ruling deemed NSA telecommunications surveillance to be substantially illegal, Leon stayed the ruling and gave the government six months to appeal.
Subsequent developments On the ruling, The Washington Post noted: "NSA officials... now stand accused of presiding over a program whose capabilities were deemed by the judge to be 'Orwellian' and likely illegal." Edward Snowden issued a statement in response to the ruling, saying in part:
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