Open thread for night owls: Civil liberties be damned

As you may recall, the New York Times belatedly told the nation about the government's secret domestic spying program in December 2005.

To condense, the National Security Agency eavesdropped on Americans when it believed phone conversations with individuals overseas were linked to terrorism. NSA enrolled, intimidated or otherwise gained the assistance of the telecommunication giants in this process without going through the niceties of getting congressionally mandated warrants from a special 11-judge court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Going around the court was done even though it had throughout its history almost never turned down requests for warrants and usually granted the ones it rejected after they were modified.

Subsequent to the Times story, it was learned that NSA was secretly amassing a database of all U.S. phone calls.

This violation of the law soon sparked lawsuits. But most of them were tossed out of court. In a recent instance where a lower court surprisingly reinstated a suit that had been dismissed, the Obama administration has appealed to the Supreme Court which has agreed to hear the case.

Another case is set to be heard before a three-judge panel Friday in Pasadena. David Kravets, who has followed these cases extensively, writes:

The Obama administration is set to argue to a federal appeals court Friday that the government may breach, with impunity, domestic spying laws adopted in the wake of President Richard M. Nixon's Watergate scandal.

The case tests whether Americans may seek recourse or monetary damages when a sitting U.S. president bypasses Congress's ban on warrantless spying on Americans ' in this instance when President George W. Bush authorized his secret, warrantless domestic spying program in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks.

A federal judge found in 2010 that two American lawyers' telephone conversations with their clients in Saudi Arabia in 2004 were siphoned to the National Security Agency without warrants. The allegations were initially based on a classified document the government accidentally mailed to the former al-Haramain Islamic Foundation lawyers.

The document was later declared a state secret, removed from the long-running lawsuit and has never been made public. With that document ruled out as evidence, the lawyers instead cited a bevy of circumstantial evidence that a judge found showed the government illegally wiretapped the lawyers as they spoke on U.S. soil to Saudi Arabia.

Against the government's objections, San Francisco U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker awarded the two lawyers ' Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor ' $20,400 each in damages and their legal counsel $2.5 million in costs. It marked the first time anyone had prevailed in a lawsuit challenging Bush's so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program. [...]

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