Alexander, the Director of the National Security Agency. The plaintiffs alleged that the government is conducting a "secret and illegal government scheme to intercept vast quantities of domestic telephonic communications with" and that the program violates First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment and exceeds statutory authority granted by Section 215. In Klayman II, the plaintiffs sued the same government defendants and in addition, Facebook, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, AOL, PalTalk, Skype, Sprint, AT&T, Apple again alleging the bulk metadata collection violates the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment and constitutes divulgence of communication records in violation of Section 2702 of Stored Communications Act. Others In 2015, the Second Circuit appeals court ruled in ACLU v. Clapper that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of phone metadata, which judge Gerard E. Lynch called a "staggering" amount of information. On April 6, 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union sued the FBI and DHS over the USA PATRIOT Act's authority to demand that a business hand over records that may contain private financial or business information that is not pertinent to an ongoing investigation. The specific action in question was the request of the FBI and DHS for the account information for users of an Internet service provider. Citing possible secrecy provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Justice prevented the ACLU from releasing the text of a countersuit for three weeks. After judicial and congressional oversight, sections of the counter-suit that did not violate secrecy rules of the USA PATRIOT Act were released. The lawsuit filed by the ACLU was dropped on October 27, 2006. ACLU stated it is withdrawing the lawsuit because of improvements to the law. "While the reauthorized Patriot Act is far from perfect, we succeeded in stemming the damage from some of the Bush administration's most reckless policies," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU. See also Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board report on mass surveillance In re Electronic Privacy Information Center PRISM (surveillance program) Surveillance abuse Transparency report References Patriot Act Dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy