By Brad Knickerbocker
The Christian Science Monitor

Ashland, Ore. - It’s hard - often impossible - to prove that secret government wiretapping in the name of national security is violating one’s privacy rights. The evidence itself usually is top secret.

But one rather obscure case could pull back the veil on a surveillance program that’s at the heart of the US fight against terror. In the federal appeals court in San Francisco Wednesday, lawyers for a Saudi charity accused of helping Al Qaeda will argue that their clients, including two American attorneys, were illegally spied on without the required court warrant.

How do they know? Treasury Department officials inadvertently provided them with National Security Agency (NSA) call logs stamped “top secret.”

By the time federal agents had retrieved the logs of recorded calls six weeks later, the information had been shared with five other lawyers, two officials of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation’s US branch in southern Oregon, and a reporter with The Washington Post.

Because the government took back copies of the call logs, federal judges at the district-court level agreed to let those who saw them rely on their memory of what they saw as evidence. The judges also said that they have “standing” in federal courts - that they have enough of a case to sue the federal government.

If the appeals court agrees with the lower court, the US Supreme Court is likely to become involved. The case could have broader significance as well since it deals with presidential power during wartime.

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