Morning Wrap: A Secret Demand from the FBI | Airline Apologizes to Dallas Lawyer

— Bobby Abtahi (@BobbyAbtahi) December 1, 2015

The Dallas Morning News has more on the story here.

REVEALED: “After a decade of court battles, the Internet entrepreneur who filed the first legal challenge to a type of secret administrative order known as a national security letter revealed on Monday the breadth of an F.B.I. demand in 2004 for information about a customer,” The New York Times reports.

BOOK TV: The NLJ’s Zoe Tillman interviewed Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner Roberta Kaplan about Kaplan’s book, “Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA,” for an episode of C-SPAN’s Book TV that aired on Monday.

BACKPAGE: The Seventh Circuit unanimously ruled against Cook County Sheriff Thomas Dart’s demand that credit card companies not process payments from those seeking to advertise on the classifieds website backpage.com. “Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Richard Posner said Dart’s “official bullying” and “campaign of suffocation” amounted to censorship, preventing even transactions for ads touting “indisputably legal” activities from being processed,” Reuters reports.

DRAGNET DOWN: The National Security Agency ended its bulk metadata collection program on Sunday, as mandated by the USA Freedom Act signed by President Barack Obama in June. In an announcement on Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence explained: “the USA Freedom Act requires that the government must now base any application for telephone metadata records under FISA on a ‘specific selection term’—a term that specifically identifies a person, account, address, or personal device in a way that limits the scope of information sought to the greatest extent reasonably practicable.”

VW LAWYERS: Volkswagen has turned to big and small firms for its legal troubles. The NLJ’s Amanda Bronstad reports New York law firm Herzfeld & Rubin, which has only 66 lawyers, has represented the auto maker for decades and will have member Adam Slater appearing on VW’s behalf at a Thursday hearing in the multidistrict litigation arising out of the company’s emissions cheating scandal. Meanwhile Alison Frankel of Reuters reports that Robert Giuffra of Sullivan & Cromwell has also entered a notice appearance for VW for Thursday’s hearing, and will also be in VW’s corner in a securities suit in Virginia.

PREET: U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara secured convictions in all counts he brought against New York Assemblyman Sheldon Silver in a Manhattan federal court on Monday. The New York Times reports: “Mr. Silver is the most prominent of a string of state lawmakers who have been convicted by prosecutors with the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. At the time of Mr. Silver’s arrest, Mr. Bharara said that the charges against him made it clear that ‘the show-me-the-money culture of Albany has been perpetuated and promoted at the very top of the political food chain.’” NLJ affiliate New York Law Journal has more here on the verdict.