Nicholas Merrill

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As of May 18, 2015, there is no article about Nick Merrill, campaign spokesman for Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, 2016
Nicholas Merrill
Nicholas Merrill 27C3.jpg
Born United States New York, New York, U.S.
Education Hampshire College
Occupation Executive Director, The Calyx Institute
Employer The Calyx Institute

Nicholas Merrill is an American system administrator, computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access, an internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995, and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act.[1]

Education and early career

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Challenging the National Security Letter: Doe v. Ashcroft

After receiving a National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI, he sued the FBI and Department of Justice and became the plaintiff in the lawsuit Doe v. Ashcroft (filed April 9, 2004 in the United States) filed on behalf of a formerly unknown ISP owner by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Civil Liberties Union against the U.S. federal government.

The letter—on FBI letterhead—requested that Merrill provide 16 categories of "electronic communication transactional records," including e-mail address, account number and billing information. Most of the other categories remain redacted by the FBI.[2]

Merrill never complied with the FBI's National Security Letter request, and eventually—several years into the lawsuit—the FBI decided it no longer wanted the information it had demanded and dropped its demand for records. However, for several years after dropping the demand, the FBI continued to prevent Merrill from publicly speaking about the NSL, or even from being publicly identified as the recipient of the NSL.[3]

Because National Security Letters are accompanied by an open-ended, lifelong gag order, Merrill was unable to be identified in court papers as the plaintiff in the case and instead was referred to as "John Doe". As the years passed and the person who held the office of Attorney General changed, the case was renamed from Doe v. Ashcroft to Doe v. Gonzales, and then to Doe v. Mukasey, and finally Doe v. Holder. In fact, in 2007 the Washington Post made an exception to its policy against anonymous op-eds (originally short for "opposite the editorial page") to publish an editorial by Merrill because of the gag order.[4]

The case yielded two significant rulings. The first was a September 2004 district court decision that the national security letter statute was unconstitutional, which prompted Congress to amend the law to allow a recipient to challenge the demand for records and the gag order.[5] The second was a December 2008 appeals court decision that held that parts of the amended gag provisions violated the First Amendment and that, to avoid this, the FBI must prove to a court that disclosure would harm national security in cases where the recipient resists the gag order.[6]

On August 10, 2010, after more than 6 years, Nicholas Merrill was partially released from his gag order and allowed to reveal his identity, although he still could not reveal what information the FBI sought from him.[7] This was 3 years after Merrill won The Roger Baldwin 'Medal of Liberty'[8] award from the ACLU, which had to present the award to an empty chair at the time.

Merrill subsequently founded the nonprofit Calyx Institute to provide education and research on privacy issues.[9] The advisory board of The Calyx Institue includes many notable people in the field of telecommunications, cryptography, privacy advocates and computer security including John Perry Barlow, Jacob Applebaum, Susan Herman and Jason Snyder.[10]

He gave the talk "The importance of resisting Excessive Government Surveillance" at the annual Chaos Communication Congress 2010 from the German Hacker Group Chaos Computer Club in which he told his story of the past 6 years.[11]

On September 14, 2015, 11 years after the initial NSL, a federal district court judge in New York fully lifted the gag order, allowing Merrill to speak freely about the contents of the NSL he received.[12][13] On November 30, 2015, the unredacted ruling was published in full.[14]

Awards and appointments

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ https://www.calyxinstitute.org/about/advisory_panel
  11. ↑ His talk at the 27c3 timetable, see also 27c3 recordings, 22/01/2011.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Patriot Award: Nicholas Merrill http://www.constitutioncampaign.org/blog/?p=6639
  16. ↑ PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Class of 2012 http://poptech.org/blog/announcing_the_social_innovation_fellows_class_of_2012

External links

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