Legal Times/Akin Gump

Since its disclosure by The New York Times in late 2005, the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program has generated a host of constitutional questions, chief among them whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — whose procedures Congress established as the exclusive means for federal monitoring of electronic communications inside the United States — conflicts with the president’s wartime duty to defend the nation from potential attack.

But in the first petition challenging the program to reach the Supreme Court, the justices will confront a more preliminary and technical question: whether individuals who feared being subject to NSA surveillance — and thus refrained from using certain forms of communication — have standing to challenge the program in the first place. The justices will consider whether to review that question at their private conference on Friday, and they could issue a decision as soon as that afternoon. (The petition is 07-468, American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency.)

Full article here.