03/02/2020 In re 381 Search Warrants Directed to Facebook, Inc. :: 2017 :: New York Court of Appeals Decisions :: New York Case Law :: New York Law :: US … The most straightforward injury is the administrative cost of gathering the required information. Facebook and the amici supporting its position advance this interpretation, and 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, [*26]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 privacy would severely damage its ability to maintain and broaden its user base.[FN24] 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 that party's rights, have standing to assert the rights of that third party? The https://law.justia.com/cases/new-york/court-of-appeals/2017/16.html 30/44