Nicholas Merrill

Last updated
Nicholas Merrill
Nicholas Merrill 27C3.jpg
Nicholas Merrill in 2010
Born
New York, New York, U.S.
Education Hampshire College
OccupationExecutive Director of The Calyx Institute

Nicholas Merrill is an American system administrator, computer programmer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access, an Internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995, and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act and consequently the first person to have a National Security Letter gag order completely lifted. [1]

Contents

Challenging the National Security Letter: Doe v. Ashcroft

After receiving a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI, he sued the FBI and Department of Justice and became the plaintiff in the lawsuit Doe v. Ashcroft (filed April 9, 2004 in the United States) filed on behalf of a formerly unknown ISP owner by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. federal government.

The letter—on FBI letterhead—requested that Merrill provide 16 categories of "electronic communication transactional records," including e-mail address, account number and billing information. Most of the other categories remain redacted by the FBI. [2]

Merrill never complied with the FBI's National Security Letter request, and eventually—several years into the lawsuit—the FBI decided it no longer wanted the information it had demanded and dropped its demand for records. However, for several years after dropping the demand, the FBI continued to prevent Merrill from publicly speaking about the NSL, consulting an attorney, or even from being publicly identified as the recipient of the NSL. [3] [4]

Because National Security Letters are accompanied by an open-ended, lifelong gag order, Merrill was unable to be identified in court papers as the plaintiff in the case and instead was referred to as "John Doe". As the years passed and the person who held the office of Attorney General changed, the case was renamed from Doe v. Ashcroft to Doe v. Gonzales , and then to Doe v. Mukasey, and finally Doe v. Holder. In fact, in 2007 The Washington Post made an exception to its policy against anonymous op-eds to publish an editorial by Merrill because of the gag order. [5]

The case yielded two significant rulings. The first was a September 2004 district court decision that the national security letter statute was unconstitutional, which prompted Congress to amend the law to allow a recipient to challenge the demand for records and the gag order. [6] The second was a December 2008 appeals court decision that held that parts of 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. [7]

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. [8] This was 3 years after Merrill won The Roger Baldwin 'Medal of Liberty' [9] 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. [10] 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. [11] 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. [12] One of the institute's projects is CalyxOS, which is a custom Android distribution using the principles of "privacy by design." [13] [14]

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. [15]

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. [16] [17] On November 30, 2015, the unredacted ruling was published in full. [18]

Awards and appointments

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Civil Liberties Union</span> Legal advocacy organization in the United States

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit human rights organization founded in 1920. The organization strives "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and has more than 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget over $300 million. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Patriot Act</span> 2001 United States anti-terrorism law

The USA PATRIOT Act was a landmark Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, and the commonly used short name is a contrived acronym that is embedded in the name set forth in the statute.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Child Online Protection Act</span> Former U.S. law to protect minors from certain material on the Internet

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was a law in the United States of America, passed in 1998 with the declared purpose of restricting access by minors to any material defined as harmful to such minors on the Internet. The law, however, never took effect, as three separate rounds of litigation led to a permanent injunction against the law in 2009.

American Civil Liberties Union v. Ashcroft is a lawsuit filed on behalf of a formerly unknown Internet Service Provider (ISP) company under the pseudonym John Doe, Inc. by the American Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. federal government, by the Department of Justice under former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

A gag order is an order, typically a legal order by a court or government, restricting information or comment from being made public or passed onto any unauthorized third party. The phrase may sometimes be used of a private order by an employer or other institution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sibel Edmonds</span> American whistleblower (born 1970)

Sibel Edmonds is a former contract translator for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the founder and editor-in-chief of the independent news website NewsBud.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony D. Romero</span> American activist

Anthony D. Romero is an American lawyer who serves as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed the position in 2001 as the first Latino and openly gay man to do so.

Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U.S. 564 (2002), followed by 542 U.S. 656 (2004), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court, ruling that the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was unconstitutional as a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech.

Title V: Removing obstacles to investigating terrorism is the fifth of ten titles which comprise the USA PATRIOT Act, an anti-terrorism bill passed in the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks. It contains 8 sections regarding the capture and prosecution of terrorists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National security letter</span> US government administrative subpoena

A national security letter (NSL) is an administrative subpoena issued by the United States government to gather information for national security purposes. NSLs do not require prior approval from a judge. The Stored Communications Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, and Right to Financial Privacy Act authorize the United States government to seek such information that is "relevant" to an authorized national security investigation. By law, NSLs can request only non-content information, for example, transactional records and phone numbers dialed, but never the content of telephone calls or e-mails.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Right to Financial Privacy Act</span> 1978 United States federal law

The Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 is a United States federal law, Title XI of the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978, that gives the customers of financial institutions the right to some level of privacy from government searches.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the Patriot Act</span>

The history of the USA PATRIOT Act involved many parties who opposed and supported the Patriot Act, which was proposed, enacted and signed into law 45 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The legislation, though approved by large majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representative, was controversial, and parts of the law were invalidated or modified by successful legal challenges over constitutional infringements to civil liberties. The Act had several sunset provisions, most reauthorized by the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and the USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act. Both reauthorizations incorporated amendments to the original USA PATRIOT Act, and other federal laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doe v. Gonzales</span> 2004 US lawsuit

John Doe v. Alberto R. Gonzales was a case in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Library Connection, and several then-pseudonymous librarians, challenged Section 2709 of the Patriot Act; it was consolidated on appeal with a separate case, Doe v. Ashcroft.

Abdel-Moniem ibn Ali El-Ganayni is an Egyptian-born American nuclear physicist, former prison Imam, and an active member of the Pittsburgh Muslim community. In 2007 El-Ganayni's U.S. security clearance was revoked, and he subsequently lost his job as a senior scientist at Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jameel Jaffer</span> Civil rights lawyer

Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. The Institute engages in "strategic litigation, research, and public education." Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account.

The WikiLeaks-related Twitter court orders were United States Department of Justice 2703(d) orders accompanied by gag orders issued to Twitter in relation to ongoing investigations of WikiLeaks issued on 14 December 2010. The U.S. government sent Twitter a subpoena for information about Julian Assange and several other WikiLeaks-related persons, including Chelsea Manning. Twitter appealed against the accompanying gag order in order to be able to disclose its existence to its users, and was ultimately successful in its appeal.

The Connecticut Four are librarians who filed a lawsuit known as Doe v. Gonzales, challenging the constitutional validity of National Security Letters (NSL) issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the USA PATRIOT Act.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">USA Freedom Act</span> 2015 U.S. surveillance law

The USA Freedom Act is a U.S. law enacted on June 2, 2015, that restored and modified several provisions of the Patriot Act, which had expired the day before. The act imposes some new limits on the bulk collection of telecommunication metadata on U.S. citizens by American intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency. It also restores authorization for roving wiretaps and tracking lone wolf terrorists. The title of the act is a ten-letter backronym that stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015.

<i>American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper</i> American federal court case

American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787, 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 Calyx Institute is a New York-based 501(c)(3) research and education nonprofit organization formed to make privacy and digital security more accessible. It was founded in 2010 by Nicholas Merrill, Micah Anderson, and Kobi Snitz.

References

  1. ↑ "Doe v. Holder | American Civil Liberties Union". ACLU. 2010-08-10. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  2. ↑ "Doe v. Holder – Redacted Version of NSL | American Civil Liberties Union". ACLU. 2010-03-26. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  3. ↑ Stokes, Jon (2009-05-18). "Obama administration reins in FBI's NSL-related gag orders". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  4. ↑ Ackerman, Spencer (2015-09-17). "Nick Merrill: the man who may unlock the secrecy of the FBI's controversial subpoenas". The Guardian. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2023-05-03.
  5. ↑ Doe, John (2007-03-23). "My National Security Letter Gag Order". Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-11-15. It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.
  6. ↑ Preston, Julia (2004-09-30). "Judge Strikes Down Section of Patriot Act". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-11-15.
  7. ↑ Hamblett, Mark (2008-12-16). "2nd Circuit Requires Judicial Review Before Security Letter Gag Order". New York Law Journal. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  8. ↑ Nakashima, Ellen (2010-08-10). "Plaintiff who challenged FBI's national security letters reveals concerns". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  9. ↑ "ACLU Honors NSL Clients with Medal of Liberty | American Civil Liberties Union". ACLU. 2007-06-15. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  10. ↑ Zetter, Kim (2010-08-10). "'John Doe' Who Fought FBI Spying Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years". Wired. Retrieved 2010-11-08.
  11. ↑ "Board of Directors - Calyx Institute".
  12. ↑ Steele, Sharon (2016-12-03). "Tor at the Heart: Torservers.net".
  13. ↑ "Projects - Calyx Institute". calyxinstitute.org. Retrieved 2021-03-13.
  14. ↑ Tremmel, Moritz (October 19, 2020). "Ein komfortables Android mit einer Extraportion Privacy". www.golem.de. Retrieved 2021-03-21.
  15. ↑ His talk at the 27c3 timetable, see also 27c3 recordings, 22/01/2011.
  16. ↑ "Decision and Order" (PDF). Calyx Institute. United States District Court, Southern District of New York. Retrieved 16 September 2015.
  17. ↑ McLaughlin, Jenna (14 September 2015). "Federal Court Lifts National Security Letter Gag Order; First Time in 14 Years". The Intercept. Retrieved 16 September 2015.
  18. ↑ "Nicholas Merrill able to reveal previously undisclosed scope of FBI warrantless surveillance tool". Information Society Project. Yale University. Archived from the original on July 7, 2016. Retrieved 2015-11-30.
  19. ↑ Patriot Award: Nicholas Merrill http://www.constitutioncampaign.org/blog/?p=6639
  20. ↑ PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012 http://poptech.org/blog/announcing_the_social_innovation_fellows_class_of_2012
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.