a firearm-related example: a hockey puck is not a "rubber bullet," just because it has rounded sides, is made of vulcanized rubber, and is capable of causing injury when launched at high speeds. Learning that one object has three characteristics in common with some category may not be very helpful in determining whether the object in question belongs in that category. In November 2013, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified and released a circa-July 2010 (date classified) FISC ruling by Judge Bates authorizing the National Security Agency to restart mass collection of internet metadata, including those of U.S. citizens. Bates noted that the NSA had been violating provisions of various laws, but nevertheless decided to allow the government to continue many aspects of the mass surveillance program. Critics of encroaching U.S. security state policies, in a nod to the Bates numbering method used in the legal field, appropriated the "Bates stamp" moniker as a neologism to refer to often uncritical FISC scrutiny of U.S. government conduct when considering Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications. On December 10, 2010, Bates dismissed a challenge to President Barack Obama's targeted killing order against Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a dual American and Yemeni citizen with ties to al-Qaeda. Bates ruled that al-Awlaki's father, Nasser al-Awlaki, who filed the suit with assistance by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, lacked legal standing in the case against the Obama Administration. Bates stopped short of granting the executive branch "unreviewable authority" to order the killing of an American citizen, instead concluding that the case would likely be settled in another forum outside the courtroom. On July 31, 2008, Bates ruled, in a dispute between the Administrative and Legislative branches, that President George W. Bush's advisers, chief of staff Josh Bolten and former legal counsel Harriet Miers, are not immune from congressional subpoenas to testify about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys and turn over all related, non-privileged documents. As a District Court Judge, Bates dismissed the GAO's effort to learn with whom Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force conferred. On July 19, 2007, he dismissed a lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband against Vice President Dick Cheney, White House political adviser Karl Rove, former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Plame's lawyers had said from the