Unsurprisingly, the Pennsylvania lawyer who tried to single-handedly challenge the Obama Administration’s surveillance infrastructure has had his case dismissed. Like similar cases, it was tossed for lack of standing.

While Elliott Schuchardt talked tough, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon found that he could not prove that he himself had been surveilled by the federal government, according to her 11-page opinion handed down in late September 2015.

Just a few weeks ago, the divorce lawyer appealed the decision to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

"It's a tough case to win but it's going to be won—either in this venue or in somewhere else," he told Ars.

Previously, in a declaration submitted to the court, Major General Gregg C. Potter, the military deputy director for signals intelligence at the National Security Agency, wrote that "although there has been speculation that the NSA, under the bulk telephony metadata program, acquires metadata relating to all telephone calls to, from, or within the United States, that is not the case."

This opinion in Schuchardt v. Obama echoes a long line of similar cases—including a very recent one from a Maryland federal court —that rely on 2013 Supreme Court decision in the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International . In short: you can't sue the federal government for illegal surveillance if you can't convincingly prove that you were targeted.

Judge Bissoon found that Schuchardt did not have the same legal weight as other similar cases, including Jewel v. NSA (still pending in the Northern District of California) and ACLU v. Clapper, which the ACLU won in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year.

The National Security Agency has proven victorious in a decent portion of Jewel—the plaintiff too was found to lack standing with respect to Upstream Internet surveillance—but that case as a whole persists.

As Judge Bissoon wrote:

Unlike in Jewel and ACLU, Schuchardt has identified no facts from which the Court

reasonably might infer that his own communications have been targeted, seized or stored. As his pleadings so much as admit, he is indistinguishable from every other American subscribing to the services of a major telephone and/or internet service provider. Schuchardt’s only discernable distinction is his heightened personal-interest in the subject, and, while his civicmindedness may be laudable in other contexts, is insufficient to confer standing.

: As Ars reported in October 2016, Schuchardt's appeal to the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals was successful—the case was sent back down to the lower court, where it remains. The 3rd Circuit said its holding was " narrow.

"We hold only that Schuchardt’s second amended complaint pleaded his standing to sue for a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures," the court wrote. "This does not mean that he has standing to sue, as the Government remains free upon remand to make a factual jurisdictional challenge to Schuchardt’s pleading."

Two legal experts that Ars spoke with at the time said that Schuchardt would have a very difficult time prevailing on his claims.

As of November 17, 2017, US District Judge Cathy Bissoon has not yet ruled on the government's most recent August 2017 filing, which seeks to have the case dismissed. For now, no further hearings have been scheduled.