This issue is political, not "criminal", as it involves a policy of US agency, not individual, and should have been kept quiet in Washington - the program was known and monitored by limited number of Congresspersons of both parties and subject to FISA Court restrictions. Noone found anything wrong with the program (except the likes of Feingold of Campaign Finance Reform fame and Schumer - far from paragon of personal liberties as Steele's credit report and identity theft scandal has shown. If the people who worried about privacy concerns of the program desired to check implementation, they could do so without disclosure leaks to newspapers for base political purposes to harm administration, and blowing the valuable program itself.
I suspect NSA has better things to do than monitor conversations between me and my spouse, but I fully expect "someone" to listen at any given time and I behave accordingly... I don't mind so much when something is done for legitimate national security purposes, especially when something like that can easily be done by law enforcement / drug enforcement / other enforcement agencies legally, and by private eyes, apparently, illegally as in "pretexting".
We can play "who is going to monitor the monitors of the monitors" games all day long, but, short of discontinuing this kind of programs altogether, this particular issue should not and will not be solved by one or the other liberal group suing a "conduit" of the legal and legitimate, while secret, government policy (AT&T) in a "friendly" venue, just because they want to find a runaround way to harm NSA. It will only create problems in the future as these kinds of surveillance programs become hardened and more difficult to uncover by the same government they're supposed to work for, and then real abuses will be more difficult find. There is a fine line in a mix between "perfect" liberty and "perfect" security, but this kind of nuisance lawsuits are only done for political posturing, publicity and fund-raising, not getting something real done. If there is anything that needed to be done in NSA case, I object to a group self-promoting and futile METHODS of going after "conduit" of legitimate government policy, rather than trying to change aspects or the whole of the policy, if they find them objectionable.
We can talk about what was initially going into Clinton's V-chip technology, and what Clinton tried to with Carnivore, we can talk about Inslaw, but the NSA's TSP clearly is not that all-encompassing (even according to enemies of administration who termed it "domestic spying program").
Anyway, this case just caught my attention because these kind of lawsuits have nothing to do with underlying NSA issue, rather just trying to exploit it and cash in on it politically or financially, sort of like "I could be Anna Nicole Smith's child's father"...