## Facts

- The National Security Agency, relying on § 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court orders requiring certain telephone companies to produce domestic telephony metadata on an ongoing daily basis.
- The program collected call-detail metadata (including numbers dialed and time and duration of calls), not call content, and stored the data for later querying under internal rules and FISC-approved minimization procedures.
- In 2013, the program’s existence became public, and civil-liberties organizations sued federal officials in their official capacities.
- Plaintiffs alleged the bulk program exceeded statutory authority under § 215 and violated the First and Fourth Amendments.
- The district court dismissed the case, reasoning that the statutory scheme impliedly precluded ordinary judicial review and that, in any event, the bulk collection satisfied § 215’s “relevance” requirement and did not violate the Fourth Amendment.
- Plaintiffs appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether the § 215 statutory scheme impliedly precluded review in Article III courts of a challenge to the legality of the bulk metadata program.
2. Whether plaintiffs had standing to challenge the program.
3. Whether § 215’s requirement that tangible things be “relevant to an authorized investigation” permitted prospective, bulk, indiscriminate collection of substantially all domestic telephony metadata.
4. Whether the court should reach plaintiffs’ First and Fourth Amendment claims after resolving the statutory question.

## Decision

- The Second Circuit held that § 215 did not impliedly preclude judicial review of plaintiffs’ statutory challenge.
- The court found plaintiffs had standing, based on government admissions and the scope of the collection, supporting that plaintiffs’ call records were among those collected.
- The court held § 215 could not be read to authorize the bulk telephony metadata program because the government’s interpretation eliminated any meaningful limit on the statute’s “relevance” requirement.
- The court vacated the district court’s judgment and remanded, declining to decide the constitutional claims because the case was resolved on statutory grounds.

## Legal Principles

- Courts will not treat a statute as barring judicial review absent clear evidence in statutory text, structure, or purpose that Congress intended to foreclose review.
- The statutory term “relevant” requires an investigatory nexus and cannot be construed so broadly that it becomes a nullity.
- Statutory authorization to compel production of “tangible things” relevant to an authorized investigation does not, without clear congressional direction, extend to ongoing, prospective, indiscriminate acquisition of essentially all records of an entire category of domestic activity.
- Congressional reauthorization of a statute does not amount to ratification of a contested, non-obvious interpretation when the program and legal reasoning were not fully disclosed such that legislative awareness is uncertain.
- When a case can be resolved on statutory grounds, a court may decline to reach constitutional claims.

## Conclusion

The Second Circuit concluded that § 215’s “relevance” requirement could not support nationwide, ongoing bulk collection of domestic telephony metadata, vacated the dismissal, and remanded for further proceedings without deciding the First or Fourth Amendment questions.


Am. Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2d Cir. 2015)