On June 12, 2013, a private citizen Verizon Wireless subscriber filed this lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution, against the President, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the National Security Agency, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General of the U.S., and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The plaintiff, represented by private counsel, asked the court for declaratory and injunctive relief, claiming that the government's search and seizure of her telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act violated the First and Fourth Amendment and 5 U.S.C. § 706. Specifically, the plaintiff claimed that the NSA was monitoring and searching her telephone records without showing first that there was probable cause to believe that she was engaged in criminal behavior.

On November 7, 2013, the plaintiff filed an amended complaint. On December 20, 2013, the plaintiff filed a motion for a preliminary injunction. On January 24, 2014, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim and for lack of jurisdiction.

On June 3, 2014, Judge B. Lynn Winmill granted the defendants' motion to dismiss and denied the plaintiff's motion for injunctive relief. Judge Winmill wrote that there was no Fourth Amendment violation in this case based on precedent, citing the Supreme Court case of Smith v Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), in which the Supreme Court held that a person has no expectation of privacy in the telephone numbers that she dials. Smith v. Obama, 2014 WL 2506421 (D. Idaho June 3, 2014). Although the NSA's data gathering goes beyond the telephone numbers dialed, this is still not a violation of the Fourth Amendment because the Ninth Circuit had extended Smith v. Maryland's holding to cover call length and call time, as well. The Court noted, too, that other courts had already found that the NSA was not violating the Fourth Amendment. See A.C.L.U. v Clapper, NS-NY-0003 and U.S. v. Moalin, U.S. v. Moalin, 2013 WL 6079518 (S.D.Cal. 2013).

Plaintiffs appealed the decision on July 1, 2014. On March 22, 2016, the Ninth Circuit determined that the plaintiff’s claims pertaining to injunctive relief were moot as the USA Freedom Act of 2015 prohibited further bulk collection of metadata. Plaintiff’s claims pertaining to the data that the government had already collected were remanded to the district court and eventually voluntarily dismissed. The case is now closed.

Jessica Kincaid - 06/16/2014
Justin Hill - 11/26/2019


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