[foresterh]

In simple terms, what do the people in the lawsuit hope to gain from the lawsuit? If they won, would the NSA have to stop the program, or would the government have to pass laws saying it was allowed?

I'm just trying to figure out what the end-game is and/or if there is any way to stop something as powerful and uncontrollable as the NSA (government in general?) appears to be.

[rayiner]

The end-goal is to get the government to stop.

The government is not uncontrollable. Litigation has stopped many government practices, historically. For example, originally the Bush administration tried to hold Yaser Hamdi (a U.S. citizen who had left the U.S. as a child and had been captured in 2001 in Afghanistan) as an enemy combatant. The Bush administration tried to claim that enemy combatants did not have habeas corpus rights. The Supreme Court disagreed. Hamdi was released and deported to Saudi Arabia on condition of renouncing his U.S. citizenship. Since then, dozens of detainees have won their habeas petitions and been released: http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-habeas-results-t....

[ChuckMcM]

The goal would be to get a permanent injunction barring the activity until such time as laws were passed making it legal. In the US system of laws its the way folks force someone to stop doing something when that someone is more than an individual (you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])

[foresterh]

"you can't put a corporation in jail but you can tell them that if they do something you will put their leadership in jail [an imperfect analogy])"

Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though? It seems like after the banking industry was pretty much caught red-handed breaking all kinds of laws and/or causing all kinds of programs to end or start, none of them ended up behind bars. I have to think the NSA would be better at avoiding jailtime than bankers...

Maybe I'm just pessimistic but it seems more like the best this could hope for is the NSA stopping Prism and then finding out 5-10 years later (or never) that they started Diamond or some other program that does the same thing except doesn't record the first 5 seconds of phone calls, or something else that "obeys the new rules"...

[dragonwriter]

> Does leadership, from a corporation either private or government (NSA, CIA, FTC, etc) ever end up going to jail though?

Yes. E.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling

[davvolun]

And if such laws do get passed, the people who wrote and supported them would be open to voter backlash, which is why they were done using secretive "guidelines."

[bmelton]

If the suit succeeds, wouldn't ratifying the Constitution be the only way to actually make it 'legal'? A law the infringes on the rights of the people without due process cannot be remedied by any other number of laws except where those laws reduce the scope to those wherein more narrow warrants are granted (I think).