Plaintiffs aiming to dismantle the NSA’s phone metadata dragnet added another complainant to their lawsuit—one who may hold the key to advancing their legal action.
Conservative activist Larry Klayman on Tuesday filed documents adding a California criminal defense attorney, J.J. Little, as plaintiff in the suit, fulfilling a requirement laid out by an appellate court last month that stopped the litigation in its tracks.
“He has litigated and continues to litigate against the Government on behalf of his clients,” Klayman stated of Little in the filing, claiming that Little is “therefore in the line of fire of Government surveillance by the Government Defendants.”
More critical to Klayman’s case, Little’s law firm, J.J. Little & Associates, is a subscriber to Verizon Business Network Services—a telecom provider that was required to hand over the entirety of its customers’ telephone records to the US government, according to a top secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order revealed by the Guardian in June 2013.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that Klayman didn’t have standing in his case since he couldn’t prove that the government was spying on him as a customer of Verizon Wireless, which—on paper—is a separate company from the Verizon business subsidiary.
Rather than tossing out Klayman’s case, however, the appellate court remanded it back to the district court to allow for Klayman to collect more evidence.
Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported that during a district court hearing last week, Judge Richard Leon instructed Klayman from the bench to add another plaintiff to the case who subscribed to the Verizon business service.
Judge Leon, appointed by former President George W. Bush, has been sympathetic to Klayman’s charges, ruling in December 2013 that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephony metadata under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act was “likely unconstitutional.”
His ruling against the program was upended by last month’s appellate court decision.
In addition to adding a co-plaintiff, Klayman has also expanded the scope of his lawsuit beyond the NSA’s phone records program, which represents only a sliver of the surveillance activities revealed by former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden.
“This lawsuit challenges the Government’s expansive acquisition of Plaintiffs’ telephone and Internet metadata under Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” the filing stated. It also takes aim at the “Government’s bulk collection of Internet content under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
Klayman’s expansion on his lawsuit makes his overall challenge to the government more significant since the phone records dragnet now has an expiration date. Congress passed legislation in June that reauthorized parts of the Patriot Act, including Section 215, under the condition that the NSA’s storage of call records winds up at the end of November.
Under the reform, which didn’t address any other surveillance programs, telecom companies will retain the data instead of the government.
