Attorney Peter Smith told an appeals court panel Monday that the National Security Agency is violating his wife’s rights.

Smith, arguing on behalf of his client and wife, Idaho neonatal nurse Anna Smith, asked a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn a lower court decision dismissing his lawsuit against the NSA’s dragnet collection of U.S. phone records.

The Seattle hearing was free of the tense exchanges and revolutionary rhetoric that featured prominently in legal activist Larry Klayman’s appeal arguments last month in Washington, D.C.

“Your guy did a nice job,” Judge Michael Hawkins told Anna Smith, who was seated in the courtroom, after an initial round of questions.

In a similarly light-hearted exchange, Hawkins said he and Judge Mary Margaret McKeown, a fellow panelist, recently watched Laura Poitras’ documentary “Citizenfour” together. The film chronicles exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden’s effort to expose mass surveillance programs.

Hawkins and McKeown said they were surprised the film included footage of themselves and Department of Justice attorney Thomas Byron - who argued the government’s case Monday - at a hearing for a separate case.

“We had no idea that one of these court hearings would be in a movie,” McKeown said. “We had no reasonable expectation of privacy,” Hawkins joked.

The third judge on the panel, Richard Tallman, also serves on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, the appeals body above the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which secretly approved the phone program for years before Snowden exposed it in June 2013.

Arguments and questioning Monday focused largely on whether the Supreme Court’s 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland allows for the NSA’s bulk collection of American phone records.

Smith said he’s not asking the court to overturn that decision, but rather to conclude the facts are so different that it’s inapplicable.

“Starting as long as 10 years ago, every single day Anna’s call records were obtained by the government and put in a database. Those call records are retained for a five-year period,” he said. “Smith v. Maryland involved a single criminal defendant where a pen register was put on the phone company’s routing system for a period of three days.”

Smith argued the duration of collection and the volume of records involved make the collection itself unconstitutional, even though the metadata involved is similar.

Byron disagreed, and returned to familiar ground, arguing the case should be dismissed on grounds the couple lack standing. The government, he said, has not admitted it collects call records from Verizon Wireless, the provider of both Smith and Klayman, who won the first and thus far only district court ruling against the NSA program.

At one point, however, McKeown pondered whether Smith might have standing because the American Civil Liberties Union (along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation) joined her case. The ACLU is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services, the corporate entity named in a court order leaked by Snowden that was authenticated by the government.

David Greene, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says he wasn't surprised by the arguments Monday.

"It went well, the court was asking good questions and taking the issue seriously," he says. "It is a really difficult case and they generally seem to want to look at the substance of the issue and not just say, 'This is just like Smith v. Maryland and we can stop there.'"

After initially defending the bulk phone record collection, President Barack Obama pivoted earlier this year and embraced ending the automatic collection and in-house retention of the records. Rather than use his executive authority to end the collection, he asked Congress to pass legislation doing so - a feat that’s so far been illusive.

Editorial Cartoons on the NSA View All 107 Images

Two executive branch review panels have found the dragnet phone program has had minimal value for catching terrorists, its stated purpose.