On Tuesday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 to revive a lawsuit brought by the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia — claiming that the NSA’s massive surveillance program is unconstitutional and invades people’s privacy. The case will now head back to Maryland court, and its impact could be enormous.

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Not only will it likely reveal more about the secret NSA surveillance program, but it could also potentially end such surveillance, explained Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “This is a chance for a real challenge to the programmatic nature of the surveillance.”

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Not only will it likely reveal more about the secret NSA surveillance program, but it could also potentially end such surveillance, explained Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. “This is a chance for a real challenge to the programmatic nature of the surveillance.”

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“The idea that when people know that they’re being spied on, that they don’t say what they really think and they don’t read what they’re really curious about,” explained Granick, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of Wikimedia and the other plaintiffs. “They act differently, and the exercise of the freedom of speech and the freedom to read are curtailed or chilled as a result of this feeling that you’re being spied on.”

This is not the only pending legal challenge to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance programs. But in the past, Granick added, groups have struggled to prove that they were spied on under specific NSA programs and statutes because there’s so little information publicly available about them. The reach of NSA’s Upstream collection program on ordinary civilians was revealed thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

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