A Federal Bureau of Investigation’s request to access the personal files of a digital library user ended in the withdrawal of its National Security Letter (NSL), after a court ruled in favor of the San-Francisco-based Internet Archive, who refused to comply with the demand and challenged it in court.

The matter only came in the public eye on Wednesday, despite the fact that the situation dates back to last year. The explanation for that is that the Internet Archive organization was banned from discussing FBI’s request.

National security letters can be used by the FBI without a court order, to obtain information of individuals, and are accompanied by a gag order that prevents the recipients from discussing the matter with anyone else but their lawyers, who must also submit to the gag order.

However, this time, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle decided to take action against a request that he though was unconstitutional, and together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), they took the matter to court.

“The information requested in the national security letter was relevant to an ongoing, authorized national security investigation,” FBI Assistant Director John Miller said in a statement. “National security letters remain indispensable tools for national security investigations and permit the FBI to gather the basic building blocks for our counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations.”

In 2001, the USA Patriot Act significantly expanded the use of NSLs, and as The New York Times reported last year, FBI isn’t the only agency to use them. According to Melissa Goodman, the legal representative of Internet Archive, the FBI issued approximately 200,000 letters between 2003 and 2006, but only three of them have been challenged in court, the Associated Press reports.