But more important, the Justice Department is reviewing cases in which charges depended on information collected from NSA surveillance:

“We have a review underway now,” Holder said. … “We will be examining cases that are in a variety of stages, and we will be, where appropriate, providing defendants with information that they should have so they can make their own determinations about how they want to react to it.”

The importance of this lies in how the Supreme Court determines when it takes a case. Earlier this year, the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and other groups because those groups couldn't demonstrate that they'd been surveilled under the NSA systems that they were contesting. A key component of the government's argument in that case, presented by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, was that individuals who had been surveilled by the NSA were informed of that surveillance and could therefore file a lawsuit themselves. Given that there existed people with standing, the Court threw out the case.

But it turned out that the Justice Department hadn't been informing defendants when it used that surveillance. In August, defendants in a case in Chicago were told that Foriegn Intelligence Surveillance Act evidence would be used against them, though the Post suggests that the first relevant example of being informed about surveillance evidence came last week. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer, who argued the case that was dismissed, told the Post that "it was a 'big deal' that 'will undoubtedly set up a constitutional challenge to it.'"

In other words, Holder may be facilitating, intentionally or not, the demise of the NSA's surveillance tools, if one of the informed defendants files a lawsuit and the Supreme Court finds that they violate the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches — a clear triumph for Edward Snowden and privacy advocates. At that point, Holder's opinion of Greenwald's work might change.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.