The secretive court that many privacy advocates denounce as a “rubber stamp” for mass surveillance is slow-walking possible resumption of the dragnet collection of U.S. call records, which it allowed for nearly a decade under an expansive interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court generally hears only from government attorneys, but in a rare move it's entertaining arguments that the once-secret call record program is illegal and should not be allowed to resume.

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli asked the court not to reauthorize the collection June 5. Judge Michael Mosman gave the government until Friday to respond and Cuccinelli the same time to supplement his filing.

"It would appear to me this is all being done as a preliminary matter to the court deciding whether or not to reissue a bulk acquisition order," Cuccinelli says, "which would mean right now I would expect the phone record dragnet is dead."

Cuccinelli, a Republican who often used his state office to sue the Obama administration, made the request on behalf of himself and the group FreedomWorks, which he also represents alongside Sen. Rand Paul in a long-stalled lawsuit against the program.

The National Security Agency's automatic bulk collection of call records ended May 31 when Paul, R-Ky., stalled a vote on reform legislation until after Section 215 and two less-controversial intelligence authorities expired.

The Senate passed and President Barack Obama signed into law the USA Freedom Act on June 2, resurrecting Section 215, which allows the collection of business records that may be relevant to an intelligence investigation.

Authors of the reform bill wrote it to allow the dragnet phone record collection to continue 180 days before a transition to case-by-case collection of records on targets and their contacts.

But the controversial program blessed by the court since 2006 didn’t spring back into being.

The surveillance court’s legal permission for the collection expired June 1, according to an unclassified memorandum the Justice Department filed last week with the court, and there appears to be no quiet reauthorization after the reform legislation passed.

“I believe it is well documented when the last authorization from the court ended,” says Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi.

Cuccinelli’s initial 40-page filing with the FISC restates many common legal arguments against the NSA program: that such broad warrantless collection violates the Fourth Amendment, that it wasn't actually authorized by Section 215 and that the 1979 government-cited Supreme Court precedent for taking information shared with a third party is not applicable.

Paul was not involved in this legal effort, according to Cuccinelli, though he no doubt supports its aim to hasten the end of the automatic call record dragnet.

In an argument likely to be restated by the Justice Department, government attorneys said in their recent memorandum that Congress sanctioned the bulk phone record collection for another six months.

“Indeed, the recent legislative debate expressly noted the continuation of the bulk collection program during this transition period," they wrote in the filing.

The relevance of Section 215 to the collection long has been controversial. Many members of Congress, including Patriot Act author Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., say the provision never authorized bulk collection. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reached the same conclusion last month in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Two other federal appeals courts are considering legal challenges to the program. One of the cases, brought by legal activist Larry Klayman, won a lower court ruling that the program likely violates the Fourth Amendment.

ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo, who successfully argued the civil liberties group's case on appeal, says it's unusual for the court to allow outside briefings and may be a positive sign the court is moving toward allowing broader input.

"It's hard to know, particularly after the debate of the last month and a half, what the FISC will do," he says, adding he finds it surprising the Obama administration is attempting to restart the bulk collection ahead of transitioning to a more restrictive collection mechanism.

Two executive branch review panels have found the call record program is not essential to preventing terror attacks. The administration has publicly identified no example of a plot it exclusively unveiled.

In one potentially significant wrinkle for the government, scholars have pointed out the legal case against the program may have shifted with the temporary expiration of Section 215.

Georgetown University lecturer Michael Davidson, a former general counsel of the Senate intelligence committee, pointed out on the legal blog Just Security that Section 215 expired before it could be modified by the Freedom Act. The lapse, therefore, may make the law an unusable and garbled mess.

Mosman specifically allowed supplemental briefing from Cuccinelli on the the effective date clause in the Freedom Act. It's unclear if the technical issue raised by Davidson and others is something he sought to clarify.