American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (2004)
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- For other cases with the same name, see American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft.
American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft (filed April 9, 2004 in the United States) is a lawsuit filed on behalf of an unknown party by the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. government. The specifics of the original case brought by the ACLU is not known, except that the unknown party is an Internet service provider, and the case involves either wiretaps or secretly subpoenaed customer records from telephone and Internet companies —ostensibly in the course of investigating possible terrorist activity.
[edit] Challenge of the lawsuit and arguments
Because of the secrecy rules involved, the government would not let the ACLU disclose they had even filed a case for nearly a month, after which they were permitted to release a heavily redacted version of the complaint (right). According to government secrecy rules (national security letter NSL provision, [Section 2709] of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, [ECPA]) the ACLU still could not disclose which ISP was served with the request to produce documents.
This prompted the ACLU to challenge the secrecy law itself, and they sued to invalidate the NSL provision (Section 2709) of the ECPA. Introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and enacted in 1986, the bill permitted the FBI to obtain customer records from telephone and Internet companies in terrorism investigations.
The ACLU argued that the NSL violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution because
- Section 2709 failed to spell out any legal process whereby a telephone or Internet company could try to oppose an NSL subpoena in court and
- Section 2709 prohibited the recipient of an NSL from disclosing that he had received such a request from the FBI, and outweighs the FBI's need for secrecy in counter-terrorism investigations.
The government agreed in principle with the ACLU's claim that the recipient of the subpoena can challenge it in court, and because the matter of specified judicial process remained in question and directly affected other present and future cases, the Court found the NSL section to be in need of review.
[edit] Court finding
The Court subsequently found section 2709 of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act unconstitutional. It reasoned that it could not find in the provision an implied right for the person receiving the Subpoena to challenge it in court as is constitutionally required. The finding of unconstitutionality essentially dismisses any claimed presumptive legal need for absolute secrecy in regard to terrorism cases. The USA Patriot Act is affected only if the limits on NSLs in terrorism cases also apply to non-terrorism cases such as those authorized by the Act. The government was expected to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, and until the district court ruling is reviewed, the secrecy procedures of the NSL letter remain in place.
