Opinion ID: 613956
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Panel Decision Puts this Court at Odds with Supreme Court Precedent

Text: Most disturbing about the court's decision not to convene en banc is that it thereby allows a novel, reduced standing standard, at odds with Supreme Court precedent, to become citable as the law of this circuit. [9] To establish standing on summary judgment, plaintiffs were required to demonstrate three elements that constitute the irreducible constitutional minimum for standing: (1) an injury in fact, i.e., an invasion of a legally protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized, and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical; (2) a causal connection, i.e., the injury has to be fairly traceable to the challenged action of the defendant; and (3) redressability, i.e., it must be likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. at 560-61, 112 S.Ct. 2130 (internal citations, quotation marks, and alterations omitted). The obvious concrete injury to be expected from unlawful electronic surveillance is interception. Plaintiffs, however, offer no evidence that they have ever actually been intercepted by FAA surveillance. Nor have they established that any such interception is imminent, a term that the Supreme Court construes to mean  certainly impending. Id. at 564 n. 2, 112 S.Ct. 2130 (emphasis in original; internal quotation marks omitted); see also Summers v. Earth Island Inst., 555 U.S. 488, 129 S.Ct. 1142, 1152-53, 173 L.Ed.2d 1 (2009) (refusing to dilute strict imminence requirement to demand only  realistic threat that reoccurrence of the challenged activity would cause the plaintiff harm in the reasonably near future (emphasis in original; internal quotation marks and brackets omitted)). Instead, plaintiffs profess only a fear of FAA interception, which is plainly insufficient to establish standing. See City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 107 & n. 8, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983) (holding that subjective fear of police misconduct, even when grounded in past injury, is not enough to demonstrate imminent threat: It is the reality of the threat of repeated injury that is relevant to the standing inquiry, not the plaintiff's subjective apprehensions. (emphasis in original)). Rather than follow this precedent to its inevitable conclusiondismissal of plaintiffs' claim for lack of standingthe panel asserts that it overstates the standing standard to require plaintiffs to demonstrate that it is effectively certain that they will be intercepted on FAA surveillance. Amnesty Int'l USA v. Clapper, 638 F.3d at 135. How does the panel elide the precise future-injury standard certainly impendingarticulated in Lujan ? By reasoning that, in lieu of injury inflicted by the government through actual or imminent FAA interception, plaintiffs can establish standing through self-inflicted injury, specifically, costs incurred to meet with foreign contacts rather than risk feared FAA interception. The panel concludes that with actual injury thus established, the likelihood of interception becomes relevant only to causation, i.e., were the incurred costs fairly traceable to the FAA? Id. As to this requirement, the panel uses a purported admonition to set a very low barIf the possibility of interception is remote or fanciful, [plaintiffs'] present-injury theory fails because [they] would have no reasonable basis for fearing interception under the FAA, and they cannot bootstrap their way into standing by unreasonably incurring costs to avoid a merely speculative or highly unlikely potential harm, id. at 133-34which is then applied to identify a claim for future injury as well. See Lynch, J., Op., ante at [167] (observing that the same analysis that supports the conclusion that the plaintiffs' present-injury theory satisfies the causation prong further supports the conclusion that the plaintiffs' future-injury theory properly satisfies the injury-in-fact prong (emphasis in original)). [10] Thus, for the price of a plane ticket, plaintiffs can transform their standing burden from one requiring a showing of actual or imminent FAA interception to one requiring a showing that their subjective fear of such interception is not fanciful, irrational, or clearly unreasonable. Id. at 133, 135. Had the idea only occurred to the plaintiff in City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675, he presumably could have avoided the need to show an actual or imminent risk of being subjected to the challenged police chokehold procedure simply by moving from Los Angeles to Glendale, and then claiming that the actual injury of his moving costs was fairly traceable to a not-irrational fear of a procedure to which he, after all, had already been subjected. [11] I doubt that the Supreme Court would have found such an argument convincing in Lyons for the same reason it fails to persuade here. Plaintiffs' coststo the extent any were even demonstrated, see infra at [184-85]are fairly attributed not to the FAA but to their own subjective fear of FAA interception, which they claim has chilled their normal exchange of international communications. The Supreme Court has ruled that such subjective chilling cannot support standing. See Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1, 10, 92 S.Ct. 2318, 33 L.Ed.2d 154 (1972) (holding that plaintiff who alleges that the exercise of his First Amendment rights is being chilled by the mere existence, without more, of a governmental investigative and data-gathering activity lacks standing to invoke federal jurisdiction). Applying Laird to plaintiffs' case, the district court explained: What made the chilling effect subjective in Laird was the plaintiffs' failure to show that they were subject to the challenged policy and faced a threat of harm from it. The plaintiffs could only show that the surveillance policy existed. The plaintiffs' failure to substantiate the alleged chill with proof that they really were subject to the information gathering policy made their alleged chill subjective. See Ozonoff v. Berzak, 744 F.2d 224, 229 (1st Cir.1984) (Breyer, J.) (interpreting phrase without more in Laird to mean that [t]he plaintiffs in Laird did not claim that the information gathering activities were directed against them specifically or that the gathered data could be directly used against them in any foreseeable way). All of the plaintiffs' alleged objective expenditures are insufficient to establish standing because they all arise from the plaintiffs' choices to incur expenditures and costs that are not based on a sufficient showing that the statute in question was directed at them. Amnesty Int'l USA v. McConnell, 646 F.Supp.2d at 655. The Laird concerns highlighted by the district courtand referenced by then-Judge Breyer in Ozonoff are not allayed by plaintiffs' self-incurred travel costs. As a matter of law, plaintiffs cannot be the targets of FAA surveillance. Thus, whether they incurred costs or not, they cannot show that information gathering activities under the challenged statute will be directed against them. Indeed, the statute provides specific safeguards to ensure against that possibility, see 50 U.S.C. § 1881a(b)-(d), (f)-(g), as well as strict limits on the use of any information coincidentally intercepted from United States persons, see id. §§ 1801(h), 1806, 1881a(e), 1881e(a). To sidestep the adverse standing conclusion dictated by Laird, the panel attempts to cabin that Supreme Court decision to its facts and to dismiss as dictum any part that might be construed to identify a general rule. See Amnesty Int'l USA v. Clapper, 638 F.3d at 146-48. The panel posits that the Laird plaintiffs so obviously lacked standing that the Court did not need to create stricter standing rules in the surveillance context in order to deny plaintiffs standing. Id. at 148. [12] I agree that Laird did not establish stricter standing rules for surveillance cases. But I cannot agree that the Supreme Court was pronouncing mere dictum when it identified circumstances where a subjective chilling effect cannot support standing. The Court made this point in distinguishing cases in which standing had been recognized even though the deterrent, or `chilling,' effect of governmental regulations [fell] short of a direct prohibition against the exercise of First Amendment rights. Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. at 11, 92 S.Ct. 2318. It stated as follows: In none of these cases, ... did the chilling effect arise merely from the individual's knowledge that a governmental agency was engaged in certain activities or from the individual's concomitant fear that, armed with the fruits of those activities, the agency might in the future take some other and additional action detrimental to that individual. Rather, in each of these cases, the challenged exercise of governmental power was regulatory, proscriptive, or compulsory in nature, and the complainant was either presently or prospectively subject to the regulations, proscriptions, or compulsions that he was challenging. Id. It can perhaps be debated whether the second sentence should be construed as definitional or merely illustrative of circumstances where a chilling effect can establish standing. [13] But what the panel could not do was dismiss the first sentence, which holds that the circumstances there identified cannot support standing. Thus, Laird compels the conclusion here that plaintiffs lack standing because any chilling of their electronic communications with foreign contacts, including costs incurred in forgoing such communications, arose merely from their knowledge of the existence of a program that they feared could target their contacts. Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. at 11, 92 S.Ct. 2318. In concluding otherwise, the panel not only fails to follow Lyons and Laird, but also misapplies Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 120 S.Ct. 693, 145 L.Ed.2d 610 (2000). In that case, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs who had taken steps to avoid a polluted river had standing to challenge defendants' unlawful discharge of pollutants into the waterway. The panel cites Laidlaw as support for its conclusion that [d]espite not being directly regulated, a plaintiff may establish a cognizable injury in fact by showing that he has altered or ceased conduct as a reasonable response to the challenged statute. Amnesty Int'l USA v. Clapper, 638 F.3d at 141. This ignores circumstances critical to the Laidlaw decision that are notably absent from this case. In Laidlaw, the defendant was then actually discharging pollutants into the river, making plaintiffs' exposure to those pollutants certain if they resumed their abandoned recreational use of the river. It was in these circumstances where, but for plaintiffs' own forbearance, they would unquestionably have been subjected to the injurious conduct, that the Court addressed the reasonableness of plaintiffs' avoidance of the river. See Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. at 184, 120 S.Ct. 693 (concluding that there was nothing improbable about the proposition that a company's continuous and pervasive illegal discharges of pollutants into a river would cause nearby residents to curtail their recreational use of that waterway and would subject them to other economic and aesthetic harms (internal quotation marks omitted)). In short, Laidlaw established a two-step standing inquiry, requir[ing] that plaintiffs demonstrate that they (1) are in fact subject to the defendant's conduct, in the past or future, and (2) have at least a reasonable fear of harm from that conduct. ACLU v. NSA, 493 F.3d at 689 (Gibbons, J., concurring) (emphasis added). Here, plaintiffs' standing claim fails at the first step of the Laidlaw analysis. They cannot demonstrate that the executive is certainly conducting FAA surveillance of their foreign contacts, much less that if they resume electronically communicating with these contacts, they will in fact be intercepted. Plaintiffs assert that they reasonably fear such interception, but whether they will ever be subject to it remains a matter of complete conjecture. See id. at 656 (Batchelder, J.) (stating with respect to similarly situated plaintiffs that even though their fears of surveillance may be reasonable, the alternative possibility remains that the NSA might not be intercepting, and might never actually intercept, any communication by any of the plaintiffs named in this lawsuit (emphasis in original; footnote omitted)). For that reason, plaintiffs' situation is more aptly analogized to Lyons than to Laidlaw in that they claim only `subjective apprehensions' that FAA surveillance will even take place.  Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. at 184, 120 S.Ct. 693 (quoting Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. at 107 n. 8, 103 S.Ct. 1660, in distinguishing two cases) (emphasis in Laidlaw ). The distinction the Supreme Court thus draws between the facts supporting standing in Laidlaw and those failing to support standing in Lyons must be recognized as one of kind, not degree, i.e., between subjective apprehension in Lyons as to whether challenged governmental conduct would even take place, and the subjective issue in Laidlaw as to whether it was reasonable for plaintiffs to fear harm from pollutants that unquestionably were being discharged into the river. ACLU v. NSA, 493 F.3d at 690 (Gibbons, J., concurring). In short, what was uncertain about the claimed injury in Laidlaw was not defendants' conductabout which there was no doubtbut the science of pollution. Likewise, in other prospective injury cases cited by the panel, the plaintiffs were found to have standing because they were subject to the conduct challenged, or at least certainly would be subject to it if they took certain actions within their control. [14] Thus, as Judge Gibbons observed, it is error to transform the Supreme Court's holding in Laidlaw, under which the plaintiffs who were in fact subject to defendant's conduct had standing because they reasonably feared harm from that conduct, into a much broader proposition, under which plaintiffs may establish standing by showing merely that they possess a reasonable fear of being subject to defendant's allegedly harmful conduct.  Id. at 689 (emphasis in original). This court needs to say so en banc.