Opinion ID: 4562342
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Telephony Metadata Collection Program

Text: The government’s telephony metadata collection program was authorized in a series of classified orders by the FISA Court under FISA Subchapter IV, the “business records” subchapter. 5 See In re Application of the FBI for an Order Requiring the Prod. of Tangible Things from [redacted], No. BR 13-80, 2013 WL 5460137, at  (FISA Ct. Apr. 25, 2013). These orders required major telecommunications providers to turn over to the government on an “ongoing daily” basis a “very large volume” of their “call detail records.” In re Application of the FBI for an Order Requiring the Prod. of Tangible Things from [redacted], No. BR 13-109, 2013 WL 5741573, at  (FISA Ct. Aug. 29, 2013) (“In re Application II”). Specifically, providers were ordered to produce “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ . . . for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” Id. at . These records included 5 The FISA Court was established by Congress to entertain applications by the government to take investigative actions authorized by FISA. 50 U.S.C. § 1803(a). Broadly, “FISA authorizes the federal government to engage in four types of investigative activity [in the United States]: electronic surveillance targeting foreign powers and agents of foreign powers; physical searches targeting foreign powers and agents of foreign powers; the use of pen registers and trap-and-trace devices . . . ; and court orders compelling the production of tangible things in connection with certain national security investigations.” David Kris & J. Douglas Wilson, National Security Investigations and Prosecutions § 4:2 (3rd ed. 2019). 16 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN information such as the phone numbers involved in a call and the time and duration of the call, but not the voice content of any call. Id. at  n.2. The court orders authorized the NSA to compile the records into a database and to query the database under certain conditions to obtain foreign intelligence information. See id. at . During the time period relevant to this case, the government was permitted to search the database when certain NSA officials determined that “reasonable, articulable suspicion” existed connecting a specific selection term—for example, a particular phone number—with “one of the identified international terrorist organizations.” Id. The government was also allowed to search phone numbers within three “hops” of that selector, i.e., the phone numbers directly in contact with a selector, the numbers that had been in contact with those numbers, and the numbers that had been in contact with those numbers. In re Application of the FBI for an Order Requiring the Prod. of Tangible Things from [redacted], No. BR 14-96, 2014 WL 5463290, at  & n.2 (FISA Ct. June 19, 2014). Snowden’s disclosure of the metadata program prompted significant public debate over the appropriate scope of government surveillance. In June 2015, Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which effectively ended the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata collection program. Pub. L. No. 114-23, 129 Stat. 268 (codified at 50 U.S.C. § 1861). The Act prohibited further bulk collection of phone records after November 28, 2015. Id.; see Smith v. Obama, 816 F.3d 1239, 1241 (9th Cir. 2016). Besides ending the bulk collection program, Congress also established new reporting requirements relating to the government’s collection of call detail records. Pub. L. No. 114-23, § 601, 129 Stat. at 291. UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 17 Defendants contend that the discontinued metadata program violated both the Fourth Amendment and FISA Subchapter IV, under which it was authorized. They argue that the “fruits” of the government’s acquisition of Moalin’s phone records should therefore have been suppressed. According to defendants, those fruits included the phone records themselves and the evidence the government obtained through its subsequent wiretap of Moalin’s phone.
Moalin contends that the metadata collection violated his Fourth Amendment “right . . . to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV. A person may invoke the protections of the Fourth Amendment by showing he had “an actual (subjective) expectation of privacy,” and “the expectation [is] one that society is prepared to recognize as ‘reasonable.’” Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 361 (1967) (Harlan, J., concurring). Moalin asserts he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his telephony metadata. The district court held, and the government argues, that this case is controlled by Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735 (1979), which helped establish the so-called third-party doctrine in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Smith held that the government’s use of a pen register to record the numbers the defendant dialed from his home telephone did not constitute a Fourth Amendment search, because individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in information they voluntarily convey to the telephone company. Id. at 742–43. Smith relied on United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976), which had held that defendants had no legitimate expectation of privacy in their bank records. The government argues that the NSA’s collection of Moalin’s telephony metadata is indistinguishable, for Fourth 18 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN Amendment purposes, from the use of the pen register in Smith. There are strong reasons to doubt that Smith applies here. Advances in technology since 1979 have enabled the government to collect and analyze information about its citizens on an unprecedented scale. Confronting these changes, and recognizing that a “central aim” of the Fourth Amendment was “to place obstacles in the way of a too permeating police surveillance,” the Supreme Court recently declined to “extend” the third-party doctrine to information whose collection was enabled by new technology. Carpenter v. United States, 138 S. Ct. 2206, 2214, 2217 (2018) (quoting United States v. Di Re, 332 U.S. 581, 595 (1948)). Carpenter did not apply the third-party doctrine to the government’s acquisition of historical cell phone records from the petitioner’s wireless carriers. The records revealed the geographic areas in which the petitioner used his cell phone over a period of time. Id. at 2220. Citing the “unique nature of cell phone location information,” the Court concluded in Carpenter that “the fact that the Government obtained the information from a third party does not overcome [the petitioner’s] claim to Fourth Amendment protection,” because there is “a world of difference between the limited types of personal information addressed in Smith . . . and the exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers today.” Id. at 2219– 20. There is a similar gulf between the facts of Smith and the NSA’s long-term collection of telephony metadata from Moalin and millions of other Americans. In Smith, a woman was robbed and gave the police a description of the robber and of a car she saw nearby. 442 U.S. at 737. After the robbery, the woman received “threatening and obscene UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 19 phone calls from a man identifying himself as the robber.” Id. Police later spotted a man and car matching the robber’s description and traced the license plate number to Smith. Id. Without obtaining a warrant, they asked the telephone company to install a “pen register,” a device that would record the numbers dialed from Smith’s home telephone. Id. The day the pen register was installed it recorded a call from Smith’s home to the home of the robbery victim. Id. Based on that and other evidence, police obtained a warrant to search Smith’s home and arrested him two days later. Id. Holding that the use of the pen register did not constitute a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes, id. at 745–46, the Court reasoned, first, that it was unlikely “that people in general entertain any actual expectation of privacy in the numbers they dial,” id. at 742. Second, “even if [Smith] did harbor some subjective expectation that the phone numbers he dialed would remain private, this expectation is not ‘one that society is prepared to recognize as “reasonable.”’” Id. at 743 (quoting Katz, 389 U.S. at 361). Smith had “voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the telephone company” and in so doing had “assumed the risk that the company would reveal to police the numbers he dialed.” Id. at 744. The distinctions between Smith and this case are legion and most probably constitutionally significant. To begin with, the type of information recorded in Smith was “limited” and of a less “revealing nature” than the telephony metadata at issue here. Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2219. The pen register did not disclose the “identities” of the caller or of the recipient of a call, “nor whether the call was even completed.” Smith, 442 U.S. at 741 (quoting United States v. New York Tel. Co., 434 U.S. 159, 167 (1977)). In contrast, the metadata in this case included “comprehensive 20 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call.” In re Application II, 2013 WL 5741573, at  n.2. “IMSI and IMEI numbers are unique numbers associated with a particular telephone user or communications device.” Br. of Amici Curiae Brennan Center for Justice 11. “A ‘trunk identifier’ provides information about where a phone connected to the network, revealing data that can locate the parties within approximately a square kilometer.” Id. at 11–12. Although the Smith Court perceived a significant distinction between the “contents” of a conversation and the phone number dialed, see 442 U.S. at 743, in recent years the distinction between content and metadata “has become increasingly untenable,” as Amici point out. Br. of Amici Curiae Brennan Center for Justice 6. The amount of metadata created and collected has increased exponentially, along with the government’s ability to analyze it. “Records that once would have revealed a few scattered tiles of information about a person now reveal an entire mosaic—a vibrant and constantly updating picture of the person’s life.” Klayman v. Obama, 957 F. Supp. 2d 1, 36 (D.D.C. 2013), vacated and remanded, 800 F.3d 559 (D.C. Cir. 2015). According to the NSA’s former general counsel Stewart Baker, “[m]etadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. . . . If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content . . . .” Laura K. Donohue, The Future of Foreign Intelligence 39 (2016). The information collected here was thus substantially more revealing than the telephone numbers recorded in Smith. UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 21 The duration of the collection in this case—and so the amount of information collected—also vastly exceeds that in Smith. While the pen register in Smith was used for a few days at most, here the NSA collected Moalin’s (and millions of other Americans’) telephony metadata on an ongoing, daily basis for years. Carpenter distinguished between using a beeper to track a car “during a discrete automotive journey,” which the Court had upheld in United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), and using cell phone location information to reveal “an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts” “over the course of 127 days.” 138 S. Ct. at 2215, 2217 (internal quotation marks omitted). As the Court put it, “Sprint Corporation and its competitors are not your typical witnesses. Unlike the nosy neighbor who keeps an eye on comings and goings, they are ever alert, and their memory is nearly infallible.” Id. at 2219. Like the cell phone location information in Carpenter, telephony metadata, “as applied to individual telephone subscribers, particularly with relation to mobile phone services and when collected on an ongoing basis with respect to all of an individual’s calls . . . permit something akin to . . . 24-hour surveillance . . . .” Am. Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper, 785 F.3d 787, 824 (2d Cir. 2015). This long-term surveillance, made possible by new technology, upends conventional expectations of privacy. Historically, “surveillance for any extended period of time was difficult and costly and therefore rarely undertaken.” United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400, 429 (2012) (Alito, J., concurring in the judgment). Society may not have recognized as reasonable Smith’s expectation of privacy in a few days’ worth of dialed numbers but is much more likely to perceive as private several years’ worth of telephony metadata collected on an ongoing, daily basis—as demonstrated by the public outcry following the revelation of the metadata collection program. 22 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN Also problematic is the extremely large number of people from whom the NSA collected telephony metadata, enabling the data to be aggregated and analyzed in bulk. The government asserts that “the fact that the NSA program also involved call records relating to other people . . . is irrelevant because Fourth Amendment rights . . . cannot be raised vicariously.” Br. of United States 58. The government quotes the FISA Court, which reasoned similarly that “where one individual does not have a Fourth Amendment interest, grouping together a large number of similarly-situated individuals cannot result in a Fourth Amendment interest springing into existence ex nihilo.” In re Application II, 2013 WL 5741573, at . But these observations fail to recognize that the collection of millions of other people’s telephony metadata, and the ability to aggregate and analyze it, makes the collection of Moalin’s own metadata considerably more revealing. A couple of examples illustrate this point: A woman calls her sister at 2:00 a.m. and talks for an hour. The record of that call reveals some of the woman’s personal information, but more is revealed by access to the sister’s call records, which show that the sister called the woman’s husband immediately afterward. Or, a police officer calls his college roommate for the first time in years. Afterward, the roommate calls a suicide hotline. These are simple examples; in fact, metadata can be combined and analyzed to reveal far more sophisticated information than one or two individuals’ phone records convey. As Amici explain, “it is relatively simple to superimpose our metadata trails onto the trails of everyone within our social group and those of everyone within our contacts’ social groups and quickly paint a picture that can be startlingly detailed”—for example, “identify[ing] the strength of relationships and the structure of organizations.” Br. of Amici Curiae Brennan UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 23 Center for Justice 21 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted). Thus, the very large number of people from whom telephony metadata was collected distinguishes this case meaningfully from Smith. Finally, numerous commentators and two Supreme Court Justices have questioned the continuing viability of the third-party doctrine under current societal realities. The assumption-of-risk rationale underlying the doctrine is “ill suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.” Jones, 565 U.S. at 417 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). “Even our most private documents—those that, in other eras, we would have locked safely in a desk drawer or destroyed—now reside on third party servers. Smith . . . teach[es] that the police can review all of this material, on the theory that no one reasonably expects any of it will be kept private. But no one believes that, if they ever did.” Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2262 (Gorsuch, J., dissenting). For all these reasons, defendants’ Fourth Amendment argument has considerable force. But we do not come to rest as to whether the discontinued metadata program violated the Fourth Amendment because even if it did, suppression would not be warranted on the facts of this case. See United States v. Ankeny, 502 F.3d 829, 836–37 (9th Cir. 2007) (declining to decide “close” Fourth Amendment question where suppression was “not appropriate”). Having carefully reviewed the classified FISA applications and all related classified information, we are convinced that under established Fourth Amendment standards, the metadata collection, even if unconstitutional, did not taint the evidence introduced by the government at trial. See Wong Sun v. United States, 371 U.S. 471, 488 (1963). To the extent the 24 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN public statements of government officials created a contrary impression, that impression is inconsistent with the contents of the classified record. 6
Defendants also argue that the metadata collection program violated FISA Subchapter IV, under which the FISA Court authorized it.
At the outset, the government asserts that Moalin lacks standing to pursue his statutory challenge. The government 6 Defendants, relying on Alderman v. United States, 394 U.S. 165 (1969), urge us to remand to the district court for a suppression hearing. Alderman held that where the government conducted electronic surveillance of defendants in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government had to turn over to defendants “the records of those overheard conversations” so that they could intelligently litigate the question whether the unlawful eavesdropping had tainted the evidence introduced at trial. Id. at 183. The Court in Alderman was concerned that if it were left solely to the trial judge to review the recorded conversations in camera, the judge might lack the time or knowledge to grasp the significance of an “apparently innocent phrase” or “chance remark” that in fact shaped the subsequent investigation. Id. at 182–84. We decline to extend Alderman’s holding to the facts of this case. Here, the material whose collection may have been unlawful but was not disclosed was not Moalin’s conversations but his telephony metadata; the records of the overheard conversations obtained pursuant to the FISA warrants were fully disclosed. We express no opinion as to whether Alderman could appropriately apply to the government’s unlawful collection of metadata in a different case. But in the particular circumstances of this case, based on our careful review of the classified record, there is no concern similar to the Court’s concern in Alderman and thus no need to apply the case here, given the countervailing national security concerns. UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 25 relies on United States v. Plunk, 153 F.3d 1011 (9th Cir. 1998), overruled on other grounds by United States v. Hankey, 203 F.3d 1160, 1169 n.7 (9th Cir. 2000). Plunk held that a defendant lacked Fourth Amendment “standing” to challenge a subpoena to his telephone company requesting his telephone records. Id. at 1020. We reasoned in Plunk that the subpoena was directed not at the defendant “but rather at third party businesses,” and that “individuals possess no reasonable expectation of privacy in telephone records.” Id. 7 The government challenges Moalin’s standing on the same basis, which it contends “is simply an application of the broader rule that ‘the issuance of a subpoena to a third party to obtain the records of that party does not violate the rights of a defendant.’” Br. of United States 51 (quoting Miller, 425 U.S. at 444). As our cases have explained, “Fourth amendment standing is quite different . . . from ‘case or controversy’ determinations of article III standing.” United States v. Taketa, 923 F.2d 665, 669 (9th Cir. 1991). Whereas Article III standing concerns our jurisdiction, Fourth Amendment standing “is a matter of substantive fourth amendment law; to say that a party lacks fourth amendment standing is to say that his reasonable expectation of privacy has not been infringed.” Id. 8 7 Plunk also concluded that the defendant had “not demonstrated that he was within the ‘zone of interests’ intended to be protected by” the statutory provision at issue in that case, id., but the government does not raise a similar argument here. 8 Unlike Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 568 U.S. 398 (2013), this case is a criminal prosecution, so there is no Article III standing issue here. 26 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN We reject the government’s invitation to dispense with defendants’ statutory argument on the basis of Fourth Amendment standing. First, as Carpenter clarified after this case was briefed, there is no categorical rule preventing criminal defendants from challenging third-party subpoenas. Carpenter, 138 S. Ct. at 2221. Second, as discussed above, Moalin likely had a reasonable expectation of privacy in his telephony metadata—at the very least, it is a close question. Finally, and most importantly, defendants’ statutory and Fourth Amendment arguments rest on independent legal grounds, and we see no reason why Moalin’s “standing” to pursue the statutory challenge should turn on the merits of the Fourth Amendment issue. We therefore proceed to the merits of the statutory challenge.
Section 1861 of FISA Subchapter IV authorizes the government to apply to the FISA Court for an “order requiring the production of any tangible things (including . . . records . . .) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” 50 U.S.C. § 1861(a)(1). 9 At the time relevant to this case, the statute required the government to include in its application “a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation (other than a threat assessment).” 50 U.S.C. 9 All citations to the U.S. Code are to the current version unless otherwise indicated. UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 27 § 1861(b)(2)(A) (2006) (emphasis added). 10 Defendants argue that the metadata program defied this relevance requirement because the government collected phone records in bulk, without regard to whether any individual record was relevant to any specific, already-authorized investigation. The government’s theory, expressed in its initial application to the FISA Court to authorize the metadata collection, was that “[a]lthough admittedly a substantial portion of the telephony metadata that is collected would not relate to operatives of [redacted], the intelligence tool that the Government hopes to use to find [redacted] communications—metadata analysis—requires collecting and storing large volumes of the metadata to enable later analysis.” Mem. of Law in Supp. of Appl. for Certain Tangible Things for Investigations to Protect Against International Terrorism 15, In re Application of the FBI for an Order Requiring the Prod. of Tangible Things, No. BR 06-05 (FISA Ct. May 23, 2006). According to the government, “[a]ll of the metadata collected is thus relevant, because the success of this investigative tool depends on bulk collection.” Id. Defendants respond that Congress intended for the relevance requirement to be a limiting principle. They argue that the government’s interpretation of the word “relevant” is essentially limitless and so contravenes the statute. Defendants rely principally on Clapper, which held that the text of section 1861 “cannot bear the weight the government 10 The USA Freedom Act later expanded on the application requirements. See 50 U.S.C. § 1861(b)(2)(A)–(C). 28 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN asks us to assign to it, and . . . does not authorize the telephone metadata program.” 785 F.3d at 821. We agree. As the Second Circuit noted, the “expansive concept of ‘relevance’” used by the government to justify the metadata program “is unprecedented and unwarranted.” Id. at 812. The government had argued in Clapper that Congress’s intention in adopting section 1861 was to give the government “broad-ranging investigative powers analogous to those traditionally used in connection with grand jury investigations into possible criminal behavior.” Id. at 811. Although the Second Circuit agreed with that premise, it concluded that the metadata collection orders were dissimilar from grand jury subpoenas with respect to both the quantity and the quality of the information sought. First, “while . . . subpoenas for business records may encompass large volumes of paper documents or electronic data, the most expansive of such evidentiary demands are dwarfed by the volume of records obtained pursuant to the orders in question here.” Id. at 813. Second, “document subpoenas typically seek the records of a particular individual or corporation under investigation, and cover particular time periods when the events under investigation occurred,” but the metadata collection orders “contain[ed] no such limits.” Id. The Second Circuit also reasoned that the term “relevant” in section 1861 takes meaning from its context: records sought must be “relevant to an authorized investigation.” 50 U.S.C. § 1861(b)(2)(A) (2006) (emphasis added). The court faulted the government for referring to the records collected under the metadata program “as relevant to ‘counterterrorism investigations,’ without identifying any specific investigations to which such bulk collection is relevant.” Clapper, 785 F.3d at 815. UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 29 Here, the government, in the two pages it devotes to defending the metadata program’s compliance with FISA, maintains that the Second Circuit got it wrong because “[t]here were in fact multiple specified counterterrorism investigations for which the [FISA Court], in repeatedly approving the program, found reasonable grounds to believe the telephony metadata would be relevant.” Br. of United States 53. But, as the Second Circuit noted, referring to the findings of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (“PCLOB”) in a 2014 report on the metadata collection program: [T]he government’s practice is to list in § [1861] applications multiple terrorist organizations, and to declare that the records being sought are relevant to the investigations of all of those groups. . . . As the [PCLOB] report puts it, that practice is “little different, in practical terms, from simply declaring that they are relevant to counterterrorism in general. . . . At its core, the approach boils down to the proposition that essentially all telephone records are relevant to essentially all international terrorism investigations.” 785 F.3d at 815 (quoting Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, Rep. on the Tel. Records Program Conducted Under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 59–60 (Jan. 23, 2014)). The government’s approach “essentially reads the ‘authorized investigation’ language out of the statute.” Id. at 815–16. 30 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN Finally, we do not accept the government’s justification in this case that “the call detail records at issue here—the records that suggested that a particular U.S.-based telephone number may have been associated with a foreign terrorist— were clearly relevant to a counterterrorism investigation.” Br. of United States 52 (emphasis added). That argument depends on an after-the-fact determination of relevance: once the government had collected a massive amount of call records, it was able to find one that was relevant to a counterterrorism investigation. The problem, of course, is that FISA required the government to make a showing of relevance to a particular authorized investigation before collecting the records. 50 U.S.C. § 1861(b)(2)(A) (2006). We hold that the telephony metadata collection program exceeded the scope of Congress’s authorization in section 1861 and therefore violated that section of FISA. See Clapper, 785 F.3d at 826.
As a remedy for the FISA violation, defendants ask us to suppress the alleged “fruits” of the unlawful metadata collection, including the evidence from the government’s wiretap of Moalin’s phone. Because “suppression is a disfavored remedy,” we impose it to remedy a statutory violation “only . . . where it is clearly contemplated by the relevant statute.” United States v. Forrester, 512 F.3d 500, 512 (9th Cir. 2008). 11 To decide whether suppression is 11 In some circumstances a court may order suppression to remedy the violation of a statute that “enforce[s] constitutional norms,” even if the statute does not expressly call for suppression. United States v. Dreyer, 804 F.3d 1266, 1278 (9th Cir. 2015). We decline to impose suppression on that basis in this case for the same reason we conclude UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 31 clearly contemplated by FISA in this context, we begin with 50 U.S.C. § 1861, the section under which Moalin’s metadata was collected and which that collection violated. Section 1861 authorizes the recipient of a production order to “challenge the legality” of the order. Id. § 1861(f)(2)(A)(i). But it does not expressly provide for a challenge by the subject of the records collected—that is, the person whose records are collected from a third party. Nor does section 1861, either as it read at the time relevant to this case, or as it reads now, after amendment by the USA Freedom Act, contain any provision for suppressing in a criminal trial evidence obtained in violation of the section. Compare 50 U.S.C. § 1861 with 50 U.S.C. § 1861 (2006). The remainder of Subchapter IV likewise makes no mention of a suppression remedy. The lack of a suppression remedy in section 1861, and in Subchapter IV more generally, is significant because all the other FISA subchapters authorizing intelligence collection do contain a suppression remedy. See id. § 1806(g) (Subchapter I, concerning electronic surveillance); id. § 1825(h) (Subchapter II, concerning physical searches); id. § 1845(g) (Subchapter III, concerning pen registers and trapand-trace devices); id. § 1881e(b) (Subchapter VI, or the FISA Amendments Act, concerning surveillance of persons outside the United States). Of particular significance is that Congress added Subchapters III and IV to FISA in the same legislation. It chose expressly to authorize a suppression remedy in suppression would not be warranted were we to decide that the metadata program violated the Fourth Amendment. See supra p. 23. 32 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN Subchapter III 12 but not in Subchapter IV. See Pub. L. No. 105-272, Title VI, §§ 601–602, 112 Stat. 2396, 2404–2412 (1998). “[W]here Congress includes particular language in one section of a statute but omits it in another section of the same Act, it is generally presumed that Congress acts intentionally and purposely in the disparate inclusion or exclusion.” Russello v. United States, 464 U.S. 16, 23 (1983) (alteration in original). This presumption is “strongest in those instances in which the relevant statutory provisions were considered simultaneously when the language raising the implication was inserted,” as is the case with Subchapters III and IV. Gomez-Perez v. Potter, 553 U.S. 474, 486 (2008) (internal quotation marks omitted). We therefore conclude that suppression is not “clearly contemplated” by section 1861, Forrester, 512 F.3d at 512, and that there is no statutory basis for suppressing Moalin’s metadata itself. Recognizing the gap in Subchapter IV, defendants urge us to rely on the suppression remedy in Subchapter I. See 50 U.S.C. § 1806(g). As discussed, the government obtained an order from the FISA Court under Subchapter I authorizing a wiretap of Moalin’s phone, and introduced evidence obtained from the wiretap at trial. Defendants were entitled to “move to suppress the evidence obtained or derived from such electronic surveillance on the grounds that . . . the information was unlawfully acquired.” Id. § 1806(e). The statute instructs that, if the “district court . . . determines that the surveillance was not lawfully authorized . . . it shall, in accordance with the requirements of law, suppress the 12 Upon finding that the use of a pen register “was not lawfully authorized or conducted,” a district court “may . . . suppress the evidence which was unlawfully obtained or derived from the use of the pen register.” 50 U.S.C. § 1845(g)(1). UNITED STATES V. MOALIN 33 evidence which was unlawfully obtained or derived from electronic surveillance.” Id. § 1806(g) (emphases added). To obtain the Moalin wiretap order, the government submitted an application to the FISA Court including, among other things, “a statement of the facts and circumstances relied upon by the applicant to justify his belief that . . . the target of the electronic surveillance is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power.” 50 U.S.C. § 1804(a)(4)(A) (2006). The government’s application is classified, and the district court denied defendants’ request to see it. Nonetheless, defendants assume, based on the public statements of government officials following the Snowden disclosures, see supra pp. 13–14, that the application relied at least in part on Moalin’s metadata. Defendants contend that because the metadata was obtained in violation of the “relevance” provision in Subchapter IV, 50 U.S.C. § 1861(b)(2)(A) (2006), the evidence obtained from the subsequent wiretap was therefore “unlawfully acquired” for purposes of Subchapter I, 50 U.S.C. § 1806(e). Contrary to defendants’ assumption, the government maintains that Moalin’s metadata “did not and was not necessary to support the requisite probable cause showing” for the Subchapter I application in this case. Our review of the classified record confirms this representation. Even if we were to apply a “fruit of the poisonous tree” analysis, see Wong Sun, 371 U.S. at 487–88, we would conclude, based on our careful review of the classified FISA applications and related information, that the FISA wiretap evidence was not the fruit of the unlawful metadata collection. Again, if the statements of public officials created a contrary impression, that impression is inconsistent with the facts presented in the classified record. Because the wiretap evidence was not 34 UNITED STATES V. MOALIN “unlawfully acquired,” suppression is not warranted. 50 U.S.C. § 1806(e).