Opinion ID: 4157618
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: Standing under the SCA and the Common Law

Text: Because Facebook is entitled to appeal Supreme Court's denial of its motion to quash under the SCA and New York common law, the issues of its standing to challenge the bulk warrants and of the propriety of the SCA warrants themselves were properly before the Appellate Division. Because the former issue is a question of law adequately briefed by both parties, I conclude that Facebook has standing to assert its own rights under the SCA, its own rights under the common law, and the rights of its users under the traditional test for third-party standing. I would remit the case to the Appellate Division to evaluate the merits of Facebook's motion to quash, and neither have nor should have any view on the merits determination. - 33 - - 34 - No. 16 a. SCA Standing Section 2703 (d) grants service providers a right to move to quash or modify warrants (supra, Part I). Thus, to determine standing, a plaintiff need only allege that it is a service provider as defined by the statute. No one disputes that Facebook is a service provider. Therefore, the statute itself establishes Facebook's standing to file a motion to quash, in which it can argue the warrants are unusually voluminous and/or unduly burdensome.23 b. Common Law Standing Even if Section 2703 (d) did not exist, or it was interpreted to extend to subpoenas only and not warrants, Facebook laid out a prima facie case that compliance with the court order would injure it. That injury establishes standing. The most straightforward injury is the administrative cost of gathering the required information. Facebook and the amici supporting its position advance this interpretation, and 23 As to the question of whether Facebook argued that the warrants were too voluminous and too burdensome, Facebook argued in Supreme Court that this set of warrants exceeds by more than tenfold the largest number of warrants we ever received in a single investigation, informed this Court that it was forced to conduct a burdensome search of hundreds of its users' accounts, and has asserted an independent business and financial interest in ensuring that its users' privacy rights are respected. - 34 - - 35 - No. 16 Facebook's briefs here and in the Appellate Division state that the company was forced to conduct a burdensome search and seizure of an extensive number of accounts. Facebook has consistently criticized the volume of information demanded by these warrants. For instance, Facebook, which receives and complies with tens of thousands of law enforcement requests each year, informed Supreme Court that this set of 381 warrants exceeded by more than tenfold the largest number of warrants the company had ever received in a single investigation. Each warrant also requested a considerable volume of information, from an extensive number of places around the site, and unbounded by time or type of content. Whether that administrative cost is sufficiently great to require some or all of the warrants be quashed or modified is not the relevant question; the existence of even slight injury suffices to create standing. Furthermore, as Facebook and amici also maintain, the direct administrative costs of compliance are not the only potential injuries at play here. Facebook argued in Supreme Court that aiding the government in trampling the Fourth Amendment rights of its users would be a breach of the legal obligations embodied in its terms of service and data use policy. Here, Facebook also maintained that ignoring its users' constitutional right to - 35 - - 36 - No. 16 privacy would severely damage its ability to maintain and broaden its user base.24 Because Facebook's participation in delivering unbounded information concerning 381 of its users -- as well as information concerning what amounts to thousands if not tens of thousands of those users' friends and fellow enthusiasts -- could have an adverse impact on Facebook's own business operations, Facebook has articulated a sufficient injury to itself to establish standing, quite apart from Section 2703 (d). c. Third-Party Standing In addition to asserting its own rights, Facebook is here entitled to assert the Fourth Amendment rights of its users under the traditional test for third-party standing. Indeed, the District Attorney barely contests Facebook's satisfaction of that test. Instead, the District Attorney has confused the two very different questions of (1) whether and how far the exclusionary rule extends to third parties who were not the subject of an unlawful search and seizure; and (2) when does a litigant, who is in some degree of privity with a third party and better placed to stand in the shoes of that party for the purposes of vindicating 24 The costs associated with this litigation illustrate how seriously Facebook takes this threat to its financial well-being. - 36 - - 37 - No. 16 that party's rights, have standing to assert the rights of that third party? The first question is the focus of the District Attorney's argument concerning Facebook's standing, but is not relevant here. The exclusionary rule is a judge-made doctrine, designed to provide a sufficient deterrent to unlawful searches and seizures. The extent of its sweep is determined by policy judgments about how broadly (or narrowly) the rule must extend to provide a sufficient deterrent while not excessively barring the use of probative evidence. Those concerns are not at play here. In contrast, the traditional test for determining third-party standing asks whether, because an aggrieved party is poorly situated to protect his or her own rights, there is another party better situated and properly motivated to do so. Facebook is correct to apply the traditional test. Under that test, the federal courts recognize the right of litigants to bring actions on behalf of third parties, provided the litigant: (a) has suffered an injury in fact sufficient to inspire concrete interest in the outcome of the case; (b) has a close relation to those third parties; and (c) is free of some hindrance obstructing the third parties' ability to protect their own interests (Powers v Ohio, 499 US 400, 410-411 [1991]). We have not articulated a version of that test specific to New York State. The Appellate Division, writing without the benefit of Powers in People v Kern (149 AD2d 187, 233 [1989]), articulated and adopted what it then understood to be the federal - 37 - - 38 - No. 16 standard. Rather than follow the Appellate Division's outdated interpretation of federal practice, I apply the three-part Powers test. No one questions that Facebook satisfies two of Powers' three criteria.25 Thus, whether Facebook may assert the rights of its users turns on the degree to which its users would be able to protect their own Fourth Amendment rights. The District Attorney argues, and the majority agrees, that those users can vindicate their rights through pretrial suppression hearings or civil remedies. Neither I, nor -– much more importantly –- the delegates to the 1938 constitutional convention agree. Few users will be afforded the opportunity to invoke an exclusionary remedy to the alleged Fourth Amendment violation. We now know that, of the 381 users whose accounts were seized, only 62 were ever charged. Most, perhaps all, of those 62 pleaded guilty and were sentenced to probation, community service, or conditional discharge. Not one of them moved to suppress evidence seized through the SCA warrants. As we have written, to allow the failure to prosecute . . . to serve as a shield for the allegedly illegal seizure and retention of private property by 25 Facebook's conscription by the District Attorney's office and the threats to its business state injuries in fact. Its business relationship with its users, with whom it has an agreement as to the terms of service, and by whose defection its business would be threatened, is as substantial a relationship as those accepted by the courts in several landmark third-party standing cases (see e.g., Craig v Boren, 429 US 190 [1976)]). - 38 - - 39 - No. 16 government agents would be to make a mockery of justice (B.T. Prods., 44 NY2d at 233). The case at bar is even worse than contemplated in B.T. Prods. Although some of the 319 users whose accounts were seized but who were never charged no doubt owe their relief to prosecutorial discretion, a number of the users –- such as the high school students –- could not themselves have been suspected of engaging in disabilities fraud and could thus never have had an opportunity to challenge the seizures in a criminal court. It is wholly unrealistic to suggest that those high school students and other persons targeted by the dragnet, not because they were suspected of disability fraud but because they knew someone who was, should vindicate their rights by filing civil suits against the government under Section 2707 or 42 USC § 1983. The delegates to the 1938 constitutional convention, who debated the practicalities of civil suits at some length, were adamant that this suggestion may appeal to a jurist cloistered in his chambers, but let the average citizen try it! (Revised Record at 362). The delegates recognized that the excuse of the officer's zeal in the performance of what he would describe as a public duty (id.) and the expense of challenging a defendant with the financial resources of the city back of him (id. at 459) would make these remedies in any concrete instance . . . ineffective (id. at 529) and so impractical as to be unreal (id. at 519) or - 39 - - 40 - No. 16 absurd (id. at 364).26 The prospect of civil suits to vindicate unlawful searches and seizures was offered as a reason against adding article 1, § 12, to the New York Constitution. Roundly rejecting that position, the delegates, and later the People, adopted not just the language of the Fourth Amendment verbatim, but added to it the language specifically sanctifying electronic communications transmitted via a third party. Even stipulating that each user would, despite the initial indefinite gag order, be told at some point of the seizure, the mere formal 26 They also had a good deal to say against the idea that the proponents of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence could possibly have contemplated what we would now recognize as a liability rule for Fourth Amendment violations. Do you suppose, for example, that the barons at Runnymede, when they insisted on their rights from King John, were asking for the right to sue King John's police officer? . . . Do you suppose that they had any idea at all, when the asked to have this written into the Magna Charta, that what they were actually asking for was the right to go to King John after he had violated it and say, 'Now, King John, won't you remove this officer?' Why, of course they didn't. You know they didn't. There is not a man or woman in this room that believes that when the American colonists back in 1776 were putting up the fight for freedom and for liberty, when they drew up their Constitution and they put these things in, that they had any such idea in mind. Do you think the men who fought at Bunker Hill, do you think the men who walked in the snow with bloody feet at Valley Forge, do you think that the men that fought over here at Ticonderoga, were fighting for the right to resist the police officers of King George? Do you think they were fighting for the right to sue a police officer of King George, or do you think they were fighting for the right to resist an unreasonable search and seizure on the part of King George's henchmen? You know they were not. You know that when they wrote that into the Bill of Rights of the Federal Constitution they thought those were living words, not a mere empty skeleton without any meat or flesh or blood upon it. (Revised Record at 460) - 40 - - 41 - No. 16 possibility of a civil suit does not foreclose Facebook from asserting third-party standing as the litigant best placed to vindicate its users' rights in practice, before a violation of any rights has occurred, by way of the adversarial system on which our rule of law rests.