One of the stumbling blocks in various law suits regarding warrantless wiretapping by the NSA has been actually demonstrating standing in court, i.e., the plaintiff knowing that they were wiretapped and thus had their rights infringed (and/or suffered damages due to the quasi-legal taps). To get a case to proceed, you have to have standing. To prove standing, you need the case to proceed. And the whole legality of the thing can’t be challenged unless you can demonstrate standing. But
you can’t get standing unless you can show you were wiretapped. And it’s not like the Feds are telling people about it.
It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
By all accounts, that’s what happened to Washington D.C. attorney Wendell Belew in August 2004. And it happened at a time when no one outside a small group of high-ranking officials and workaday spooks knew the National Security Agency was listening in on Americans’ phone calls without warrants. Belew didn’t know what to make of the episode. But now, thanks to that government gaffe, he and a colleague have the distinction of being the only Americans who can prove they were specifically eavesdropped upon by the
NSA’s surveillance program.The pair are seeking $1 million each in a closely watched lawsuit against the government, which experts say represents the greatest chance, among over 50 different lawsuits, of convincing a key judge to declare the program illegal.
(via BoingBoing)