Court case

Sealed law enforcement requests to track Americans without a warrant through cellphone location records or Internet activity grew sevenfold in the past three years in the District, new information released by a federal judge shows. Details about the growth come as the US Supreme Court weighs whether to rein in such rapidly expanding demands. Legal experts said the disclosure appears to mark a first, and that neither the Justice Department nor private companies have previously made public such specific data about how often law enforcement agencies seek those court orders. The summary data gave counts of requests by year from 2008 through 2016 made in criminal cases handled by the Justice Department or US attorney’s office for the District. Details about each individual case, such as the name of a suspect or what records were sought, were not disclosed.

The requests were made under a 1986 statute that enables law enforcement agencies to obtain court orders requiring ­communication service providers to turn over records about individual customers. The orders do not apply to information about telephone calls, such as the time, date, duration and numbers dialed, which can be obtained in other ways. Instead, the requests seek individuals’ Internet connection records or cellphone tower records. Those records exclude the content of communications but can be highly valuable to investigators seeking to establish a history or pattern of movement, conduct or relationships. The information requests can include Internet browsing logs and activity; the time, date, size, sender and recipient of email, instant or social media messages, or other transaction records; as well as computer identification numbers and information about websites that a user accessed.

The Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that gag orders issued with warrant-like national security letters do not violate the First Amendment. National security letters serve the same functions as a warrant but do not require judicial oversight. They are frequently used to solicit digital data from telecom companies and are frequently accompanied by nondisclosure orders barring the companies from informing customers that law enforcement has harvested their data.

Credo Mobile and CloudFlare, a cybersecurity firm, received a total of five national security letters between 2011 and 2013 and sued, arguing they had a First Amendment right to notify customers. In 2013, District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the letters were unconstitutional, but stayed her decision and later reversed it in 2016 once lawmakers added additional civil liberties protections. The appeals court upheld Illston's amended opinion, agreeing that civil liberties safeguards in place — including notifying recipients the letters could be challenged in court — were adequate. "The nondisclosure requirement in the NSL law therefore does not run afoul of the First Amendment," wrote Judge Sandra Ikuta in the decision.

A Tribune Media shareholder has filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to halt the company's sale to Sinclair Broadcast Group. The shareholder, Sean McEntire, is seeking class-action status in the lawsuit, filed in federal court in Chicago. McEntire accuses Chicago-based Tribune Media of giving stockholders incomplete and misleading information about the deal, including failing to provide portions of the companies' financial projections, the value of another bid for Tribune Media and other details of the process leading to the merger agreement. McEntire is asking the court to block Sinclair's purchase until Tribune Media shares the information he claims was withheld, or award damages if the deal goes through before the information is disclosed.

Seven people blocked by President Trump from seeing or interacting with his Twitter account filed a lawsuit against him, arguing that barring them from his popular social-media feed violates the First Amendment to the Constitution. The lawsuit, which raises interesting questions about what constitutes a public forum, as well as the boundaries of free-speech rights on the Web, comes as Trump continues to draw concern about his novel and erratic use of social media.

“President Trump’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, has become an important source of news and information about the government, and an important public forum for speech by, to, and about the President,” the lawsuit said. “In an effort to suppress dissent in this forum, Defendants have excluded — 'blocked' —Twitter users who have criticized the President or his policies. This practice is unconstitutional, and this suit seeks to end it." The Twitter users, represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said that Trump's actions violated their Constitutional rights in several ways. They argued that the president has restricted their participation in a public forum, their ability to access official public statements made by him and their capacity to petition the government to air their grievances.

The Twitter users said they brought the lawsuit to seek a declaration that Trump's actions were unconstitutional and to get an injunction requiring President Trump to unblock their accounts and preventing him from blocking other people because of their views.

The House of Representatives adopted the Email Privacy Act in February to modernize the protections afforded electronic communications that would require obtaining a search warrant in almost every case. That proposal met resistance in the Senate in 2016 when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sought to add a provision allowing law enforcement to skip the warrant requirement in emergency situations. Whether the legislation can get through the current Senate is an open question, and it is not clear whether President Donald Trump would sign off if the Justice Department opposes the bill. That may mean the Supreme Court will have to establish the broad parameters of digital privacy while Congress tries to deal with the intricacies of a world of electronic communication that continues to evolve rapidly.

Devices connected to the internet, from cellphones to watches to personal training trackers that facilitate our personal habits and communications, are a fact of daily life, and the Supreme Court will have to start drawing clear lines around what types of electronic information are — and are not — protected by the Fourth Amendment. Simply asserting that there is a right to privacy does not provide much help in determining how far that protection should extend in a digital world.

With each tweet, President Trump says he’s redefining the American presidency, describing his use of social media as “modern day presidential” and necessary to fight what he deems fake news. Not everyone agrees on the substance of Trump’s social media message, but both his supporters and detractors have something in common: They want access to Trump’s frenetic Twitter feed. Which is why the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven Twitter users who say their 1st Amendment rights were violated after they were blocked from reading Trump’s personal account (@realDonaldTrump, not the official @POTUS account) after criticizing him or his policies. The suit, filed in US District Court in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, names President Trump, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and White House director of social media Dan Scavino as defendants. The Knight Institute sent a letter to the White House in June threatening legal action if it didn’t heed its call to unblock followers.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico has sued the city of Albuquerque, seeking records by the city’s police department about its use of stingrays, also known as cell-site simulators. In May 2017, the ACLU of New Mexico filed a public records request to the Albuquerque Police Department (which has been under federal monitoring for years), seeking a slew of information about stingrays. The requested info included confirmation on whether the police had stingrays, "policies and procedures," and contracts with the Harris Corporation, among other materials. Albuquerque denied many of these requests, citing a state law that allows some public records to be withheld on the grounds that they reveal "confidential sources, methods." So, the week of July 3, the ACLU of New Mexico sued.

In a big victory for cable operators large and small, a federal court has said the Federal Communications Commission was within its authority to make it easier for cable video services to shed basic rate regulations. The US Court of Appeals has upheld the FCC's decision—under former chairman Tom Wheeler—reversing the rebuttable presumption that cable operators are not subject to local competition, thereby making regulators prove there is a lack of competition or rate regulations go away.

The onus had been on cable operators to prove their was competition, but the FCC concluded that the near-nationwide availability of DBS essentially represented that competition. The commission, with the strong backing of cable operators—NCTA–The Internet & Television Association and American Cable Association both intervened in the court challenge on the FCC's side—in 2016 voted to reverse the rebuttable presumption and assume cable systems faced local market competition (primarily given the ubiquity of satellite TV) unless telecom regulators or other challengers could prove they did not. A finding of effective competition lifts basic cable price regulations. Writing for the three-judge panel that rejected the challenge to that decision by the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, and the Northern Dakota County Cable Communications Commission, judge Douglas Ginsburg said the FCC decision was within its authority.

A federal judge in California has decided to allow Twitter’s lawsuit against the attorney general’s office to go forward. She rejected arguments that the social media giant should not be allowed to be precise in its transparency reports when describing how it responds to the government’s requests for user data.

Twitter has argued that, just as it has been precise in other areas of its transparency report, so too should it be allowed to say precisely how many national security orders it has received from American authorities. For now, under federal law, it is only allowed to describe those numbers in vague ranges, such as “0 to 499,” and “500 to 999,” and so forth. Lawyers for Twitter say that this law constitutes a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights and is “prior restraint,” a concept of blocking legitimate speech before it is uttered. Attorneys from the Department of Justice claimed in a hearing in federal court in Oakland, California, earlier this year that if Twitter is allowed to specifically say how many national security orders it has received, potential adversaries could somehow use that number to inflict harm. But the judge didn’t buy it.

Billionaire Carlos Slim's America Movil argued on July 5 against rules brought in by an overhaul of the country's telecommunications industry, saying in a statement they were unfair and had led to a loss of its business rights. In the latest chapter in a fight that could shape the future of competition in the sector, the supreme court is considering whether to undo parts of an overhaul that tilted the playing field against Slim's long-dominant America Movil and led to steep drops in prices that Mexicans pay for cell phone service and internet access.

Slim's lawyers argued that unfair "asymmetrical" rules prohibit America Movil from charging other telephone carriers for connecting their calls made to customers on its network, but let those companies charge America Movil for connecting its calls to their customers. The so-called "zero tariff" applied to Slim's company has undermined the power of the sector's regulator IFT as well as the rights of America Movil units Telmex and Telcel under past concessions awarded to them by the government, the statement said. The company said it has been harmed by the elimination of its rights to "cost recovery, economic stability and financial balance" granted by the concessions.