Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
I'll be interested to see how the rulings on standing go. That seems like the crux of the matter to me, because the issue is not just "was your name mentioned," but also "were you harmed?"4th Amendment cases are usually litigated in the context of a criminal appeal; obviously a defendant is facing real jeopardy in a prosecution, and therefore has standing.Civil lawsuits exist to make plaintiffs whole after suffering a harm. But the court might find that being surveilled, alone and by itself, is not harm. The court could say that nothing has been removed, destroyed, prevented, or altered in Wikimedia's servers, so they have no harm to make whole.The court could say that merely copying data does no harm to the original data creator or holder. (This argument might sound familiar here on HN, as it is sometimes used to argue that file sharing does no legal harm to publishers.)