The ACLU earlier this week filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in ACLU v. Clapper, the case in the Southern District of New York challenging the NSA's mass collection of Americans' telephone data. We most recently posted on the NSA program, in EFFs suit against it, here.
The ACLU argues that it has a substantial likelihood of success on its Fourth and First Amendment challenges to the NSA program. The group also argues that the government exceeded its statutory authority under Section 215 of the Patriot Act in collecting telephony metadata.
At the same time, the government filed a motion to dismiss. The government claims that the ACLU lacks standing (under Clapper v. Amnesty International), that Congress impliedly precluded judicial review of the NSA program, that the NSA program is authorized by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and that the program doesn't violate the Fourth and First Amendments.
Standing will certainly be an important threshold issue in the case, especially after the Court's ruling in Amnesty International. In that case, the Court ruled that a group of attorneys and organizations didn't have standing to challenge the FISA Amendments Act, which allowed the Attorney General and the DNI to acquire foreign intelligence information by jointly authorizing the surveillance of individuals who are not "United States persons" and are reasonably believed to be outside the United States. The Court said that the plaintiffs' alleged injury-in-fact was too speculative–that the plaintiffs couldn't show that they'd be targets of surveillance under this FISA authority, that the FISA court would necessarily approve the surveillance of them, or that the government would succeed in its surveillance of them.
Here, in contrast, the ACLU alleged in its complaint that its telephone communications were and are monitored, that this monitoring would reveal privileged and sensitive information between the ACLU and its clients, and that the monitoring will likely have a chilling effect on the group's communications with clients. In other words, the ACLU tried to navigate the Amnesty International barrier and show with more determinacy that it has suffered a sufficient injury in fact.