American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787 (2nd Cir., 2015), was a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliate, the New York Civil Liberties Union, against the United States federal government as represented by then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The ACLU challenged the legality and constitutionality of the National Security Agency's (NSA) bulk phone metadata collection program. The challenge was initially rejected in District Court, but that ruling was overturned at the Circuit Court level, where Judge Gerard E. Lynch ruled that the "staggering" amount of information collected by the NSA was a violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Patriot Act. However, this particular complaint later became moot when the U.S. Congress clarified NSA surveillance procedures in the USA Freedom Act of 2015. Background The lawsuit arose in the wake of disclosures by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealing a system of global surveillance by the NSA and its international partners. In one particular revelation, The Guardian reported that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, at the request of the NSA, had ordered Verizon to hand over several months' worth of personal communications records for many of its customers. The phone numbers of both parties on a call were handed over, as was the call's location, time, and duration. The contents of the conversations were not covered in the order, but the metadata could be collected without a warrant under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The ACLU sued Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, NSA Director Keith B. Alexander, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, claiming that the NSA's mass surveillance program violated the First and Fourth Amendments, and particularly the warrant requirements of the latter. Specifically, the ACLU argued that collection of telephone metadata constituted an invasion of privacy and unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment for Verizon subscribers, and that collecting the data could chill the free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment if people became reluctant to communicate due to a fear of government surveillance. Litigation history Initial District Court ruling The case was first heard at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. On December 28, 2013, Judge William Pauley dismissed the ACLU's complaint. Pauley ruled that phone users had no reasonable expectation of privacy for phone metadata, so a