On June 2, 2014, a private individual filed this class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The plaintiff sued the National Security Agency under the Declaratory Judgment Act and FISA Title V. The plaintiff alleged violations of his First and Fourth Amendment rights and requested declaratory, injunctive, and monetary relief. Specifically, the plaintiff alleged that both metadata and content of his Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox accounts were compromised under the PRISM program as revealed in the documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to The Guardian in an article published on June 6, 2013.

The complaint was filed as a putative class action, but the class action status has not yet been adjudicated. On December 11, 2014, the NSA filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that the court lacked jurisdiction and the plaintiff failed in any event to state claims on which relief may be granted. On January 7, 2015, the plaintiff filed a motion for preliminary injunction with the District Court, requesting that the court bar the NSA from continuing to collect the plaintiff's metadata and content, direct the NSA to destroy the plaintiff's data, and prohibit the NSA from querying the data currently in their possession. On January 8, 2015, Judge Cathy Bisson denied the plaintiff's motion because of the plaintiff's inability to establish sufficient imminent and irreparable harm.

The District Court granted the defendant's motion to dismiss on September 30, 2015. 2015 WL 5732117. The plaintiff appealed the dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. The Third Circuit vacated and remanded the case on October 5, 2016 finding that the injuries allegedly sustained by the plaintiff were sufficiently personal to support standing, and that his claim was sufficiently plausible to support his standing to bring suit. Schuchardt v. President of the United States, 839 F.3d 366 (3d Cir. 2016). Once remanded, the negotiated whether the case would continue in light of information provided to the plaintiff by the government.

A private third party moved to intervene in the case on December 13, 2016, and Judge Bisson denied his motion as frivolous on December 27. The third party appealed the motion's denial to the Third Circuit on January 27, 2017. The Third Circuit dismissed the appeal for failure to pay the filing fee on February 23, 2017.

On March 15, 2017, the defendants filed a renewed motion to dismiss. The case was administratively closed from March 16, 2017 through July 6, 2017, on the grounds that plaintiff was given an extended amount of time to respond to the motion to dismiss. The plaintiff filed its opposition on July 10. The defendants filed their reply on August 16, 2017.

During this time, The Third Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the appeal of the third party to be reopened, and then dismissed the third party's case on September 6, 2017 for failure to pay the filing fee for the notice of appeal.

On February 4, 2019, the court granted the defendant’s renewed motion to dismiss, noting that “they have shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the government did not engage in dragnet-type collection activity . . . thereby establishing a plausible claim that Plaintiff’s data was captured.” 2019 WL 426482. The plaintiffs appealed to the Third Circuit on February 12, and the Third Circuit affirmed on March 2, 2020. 802 Fed.Appx. 69.

The case is ongoing.

John He - 09/27/2015
Elizabeth Heise - 10/13/2018
Averyn Lee - 06/05/2020


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