Michael Clancy, better known to friends on and off social media as Rabbi, received a notice last month from X, formerly known as Twitter, alerting him to the fact that the NYPD had sent X a subpoena requesting “all records consisting but not limited to all subscriber name(s), Email address(s), Phone number(s), account creation date, IP logs with timestamps (IP address of account logins and logouts), all logs of previous messages sent and received.” The subpoena also requested "all videos sent and received, including but not limited to meta-data. exit data about the messages and videos” for the account.

The notification included a copy of the subpoena, which warned X not to tell Clancy of its existence. “You are not to disclose or notify any customer or third party of the existence of this subpoena or that records were provided pursuant to this subpoena,” the document read.

But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union. Clancy did just that, and Kathryn Sachs of the New York Civil Liberties Union took up his case. Last Wednesday, Sachs wrote to the NYPD to challenge the administrative subpoena, which the NYPD had sent on its own authority, without any warrant or judicial approval. If the NYPD did not withdraw the subpoena, Sachs told the NYPD, Clancy would go to court with a motion to quash it. Rather than go to court to explain to a judge why the subpoena was necessary, the NYPD wrote back the same afternoon to say that it was withdrawing the subpoena altogether.

“This kind of administrative subpoena is not overseen by any court, and is not meant to target people like our client,” Sachs told Hell Gate. “If it’s left unchecked, it would chill speech from potentially anyone that the NYPD decided to subpoena information about.”

“We don’t give that kind of power to police departments without judicial review,” said Marty Stolar, a lawyer who has worked on similar cases in the past. “It’s got to be a process that’s connected to a court if you’re going to apply it to the general population. Here, the NYPD is misusing the power of subpoena to compel the production of documents as if they had the right to demand that information from any citizen. And they don’t have that right. We have never given it to them.”