On September 10, 2013, organizations, associations, and advocacy groups, their staffs, and their members who subscribed to major American telecommunication companies filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against the National Security Agency ("NSA"), the Department of Justice, and the United States of America. The plaintiffs, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and private counsel, sought an injunction permanently enjoining the United States' mass call-tracking program and requiring the government to purge from its possession all of the plaintiffs' call records already collected. The plaintiffs claimed that the NSA's ongoing tracking of their phone call exceeded statutory authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") and violated the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments. Specifically, the plaintiffs claimed that the NSA's surveillance invaded the plaintiffs' privacy, threatened to dissuade potential clients and others from contacting them, and compromised their ability to serve their clients' interests and their institutional missions.

On July 24, 2013, Judge White granted the plaintiffs' motion to relate this case with Jewel v. NSA, NS-CA-0006, in this Clearinghouse.

This temporary restraining order directly conflicted with an order to destroy all metadata within five years of collection issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in In re Application of the FBI for an Order Requiring the Production of Tangible Things From [Redacted], BR 14-01, NS-DC-0051, in this Clearinghouse. As a result, the FISC granted temporary relief from the five-year destruction requirement but required that telephony metadata being preserved beyond the five-year limitation not be used by the NSA for any purpose.

On October 31, 2014, the plaintiffs moved for a hearing on the partial summary judgment motion and motion to dismiss. The defendants requested this be denied because the plaintiffs' claim that the Section 215 telephony metadata program violated the Fourth Amendment was before the Ninth Circuit. On December 9, 2014, the Court denied the motion for hearing. The plaintiffs moved for a hearing again on May 22, 2015, which was denied on June 1, 2015 for the same reason.

On September 11, 2015, the plaintiffs moved for judicial notice of a fact within a government filing in a FISC proceeding that stated, "AT&T, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint have participated in the NSA's phone records program." The defendants requested this motion be denied as the fact was still disputed.

On July 19, 2017, due to changes in the Upstream Internet Acquisition technique utilized by the NSA, the Court ordered the defendants comply with the new standards and destroy data that was previously held under the restraining order with the exception of forms of online communication that included any identifier of a plaintiff.

As of November 2018, there has been no substantive activity on the docket since July 19, 2017.

Michael Mirdamadi - 04/01/2014
Jessica Kincaid - 07/07/2014
Cade Boland - 03/22/2018
Hope Brinn - 10/30/2018


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