The Electronic Frontier Foundation sustained a notable blow in one of its oldest ongoing surveillance-related lawsuits—its motion for partial summary judgment was denied on Tuesday, while a counter motion filed by the National Security Agency was granted.

The case, known as Jewel v. NSA, was originally brought by the EFF on behalf of Carolyn Jewel, a romance novelist who lives in Petaluma, California, north of San Francisco. For years, the case stalled in the court system, but it gained new life after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013.

Despite the NSA's victory in its partial summary judgment, there are a number of issues left to be adjudicated in Jewel.

“The judge's ruling only concerned Upstream Internet surveillance, not the telephone records collection nor other mass surveillance that are also at issue in Jewel,” Kurt Opsahl, an EFF attorney, told Ars, referring to the government’s program to capture data directly off of fiber optic cables.

“We will continue to fight to end NSA mass surveillance,” he added.

US District Judge Jeffrey White, in his 10-page order, found that the lead plaintiff lacked standing—e.g., she was unable to show that she specifically was surveilled. Beyond the question of standing, the court found it was not able to evaluate her claims without violating national security.

As Judge White wrote:

Based on the public record, the Court finds that the Plaintiffs have failed to establish a sufficient factual basis to find they have standing to sue under the Fourth Amendment regarding the possible interception of their Internet communications. Further, having reviewed the Government Defendants’ classified submissions, the Court finds that the Claim must be dismissed because even if Plaintiffs could establish standing, a potential Fourth Amendment Claim would have to be dismissed on the basis that any possible defenses would require impermissible disclosure of state secret information.

The standing issue here is similar to a 2013 Supreme Court decision known as Clapper v. Amnesty International. That case found that the plaintiffs (such as Guantanamo Bay lawyers) who had strong evidence to believe that they were being spied upon but could not demonstrate it to the Supreme Court’s standard, could not bring their case.

Forget about the secret room testimony

During a December 2014 hearing in federal court in Oakland, California, Judge White heard arguments from both sides in his attempt to wrestle with the plaintiffs’ July 2014 motion for partial summary judgment.

The government later submitted its own motion for partial summary judgment, which the judge granted Tuesday, and denied the EFF’s July 2014 motion asked the court to find that the government is "violating the Fourth Amendment by their ongoing seizures and searches of plaintiffs’ Internet communications." The motion specifically doesn’t deal with allegations of past government wrongdoing, nor other issues in the broader case.

In the 2008 original complaint [PDF], Jewel and the other plaintiffs alleged that the government and AT&T were engaged in an "illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet communications surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency and other Defendants in concert with major telecommunications companies." The evidence stemmed from materials leaked by former San Francisco AT&T technician Mark Klein in 2006. As Jewel was and remains an AT&T customer, her communications were intercepted by the company on behalf of the NSA, her attorneys argued.

The court was unmoved by Klein’s testimony, as Judge White continued:

However, the Court finds that Klein cannot establish the content, function, or purpose of the secure room at the AT&T site based on his own independent knowledge. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(c)(4). The limited knowledge that Klein does possess firsthand does not support Plaintiffs’ contention about the actual operation of the Upstream data collection process. Klein can only speculate about what data were actually processed and by whom in the secure room and how and for what purpose, as he was never involved in its operation.

Klein did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

Jewel stems from a 2006 case known as Hepting v. AT&T, which the EFF brought two years earlier. That case was dismissed in 2009, after Congress gave telecom firms immunity from such lawsuits—one of the lawmakers that voted for the immunity was then-Sen. Barack Obama.

In 2012, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.