A number of sections were struck by the courts. Section 805 of the Patriot Act allowed the U.S. government to prohibit citizens from providing material support for specially designated terrorist organizations, including "expert advise and assistance." Two organizations so designated were the Kurdistan Workers Party (in Kurdish it is the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, or PDK) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (also known as either the Tamil Tigers, the Ellalan Force or the LTTE). However, both these groups engaged in peaceful and non-violent activities. The Humanitarian Law Project supported both groups, and brought a civil action against the government complaining that the law was unconstitutional. The Federal court agreed and in a decision brought in December 2004 struck down section 805(a)(2)(B) because, in the courts view, it violated the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution as it was so vague that it "could be construed to include unequivocally pure speech and advocacy protected by the First Amendment." In the decision, the judge determined that this vagueness would cause a person of average intelligence to guess whether they were breaking the law, and thus potentially cause a person to be charged for an offense that they had no way of knowing was illegal.
