the amended gag provisions violated the First Amendment and that, to avoid this, the FBI must prove to a court that disclosure would harm national security in cases where the recipient resists the gag order. On August 10, 2010, after more than 6 years, Nicholas Merrill was partially released from his gag order and allowed to reveal his identity, although he still could not reveal what information the FBI sought from him. This was 3 years after Merrill won The Roger Baldwin 'Medal of Liberty' award from the ACLU, which had to present the award to an empty chair at the time. Merrill subsequently founded the nonprofit Calyx Institute to provide education and research on privacy issues. The advisory board of The Calyx Institute includes many notable people in the fields of telecommunications, cryptography, privacy advocacy and computer security, including but not limited to John Perry Barlow, Laura Poitras, Susan Herman, Bob Barr and Jason Snyder. The Calyx Institute is a member of the torservers.net network, an organization of nonprofits which specializes in the general establishment of Tor anonymity network exit nodes via workshops and donations. One of the institute's projects is CalyxOS, which is a custom Android distribution using the principles of "privacy by design." He gave the talk "The importance of resisting Excessive Government Surveillance" at the annual Chaos Communication Congress 2010 from the German Hacker Group Chaos Computer Club in which he told his story of the past 6 years. On September 14, 2015, 11 years after the initial NSL, a federal district court judge in New York fully lifted the gag order, allowing Merrill to speak freely about the contents of the NSL he received. On November 30, 2015, the unredacted ruling was published in full. Awards and appointments Roger Baldwin 'Medal of Liberty', 2007 Bill of Rights Defense Committee 'Patriot Award', 2012 PopTech 2012 Social Innovation Fellow See also National Security Letter USA PATRIOT Act Doe v. Ashcroft References External links Calyx Institute (official website) http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/nsl_decision.pdf http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/11/gagged_for_6_years_nick_merrill http://www.law.duke.edu/publiclaw/civil/index.php?action=showcase&id=29 https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=6+PGH.+J.+Tech.+L.+%26+Pol'y+8&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=32099640c7b53d75580c31af59e61709 http://www.scribd.com/doc/19030726/Doe-vs-Mukasey-Decision Living people 1972 births Free speech activists Privacy activists American activists Internet activists American computer programmers American businesspeople