The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the National Security Agency, President Bush, vice president Dick Cheney and several other members of the Bush administration on behalf of AT&T customers, in order to stop the government’s warrantless wiretapping program.

According to a statement by senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston, "For years, the NSA has been engaged in a massive and massively illegal fishing expedition through AT&T's domestic networks and databases of customer records. Our goal in this new case against the government, as in our case against AT&T, is to dismantle this dragnet surveillance program as soon as possible.”

Bankston uses the words “new case” because this is not the first time the NSA has been sued for illegal wiretapping. Back in 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union initially won a similar case as a federal court judge ruled that the NSA program “ran roughshod” over Americans’ constitutional rights and violated Federal wiretapping law. The lawsuit was rejected by a Cincinnati Circuit Court of Appeals on narrow procedural grounds in 2007, and earlier this year the U.S. Supreme Court declined intervening in an appeal, effectively killing the lawsuit.

Back in July, the Senate also passed a bill through which retroactive immunity from prosecution was granted to telecommunications companies as long as the government claimed that wiretapping requests to them were “lawful” and had presidential authorization. This decision that essentially gives the green light for any sort of wiretap, warranted or not, is the reason why the EFF had to sue the NSA and the Bush administration directly instead of suing AT&T.

Ever since the original lawsuit of 2006, one of the most disputed issues of the whole affair was the existence of a secret room used for wire-tapping and telecommunications interception in the San Francisco AT&T building, a room controlled by the NSA. Mark Klein, an AT&T telecom technician, provided the EFF with documents showing AT&T routed copies of Internet traffic to this room. AT&T throughout the 2006 trial maintained its position of neither confirming nor denying the existence of this room or any collaboration with the National Security Agency.

Initial details of the covert NSA program surfaced in 2005 with the publication of an article in the Los Angeles Times, which quoted an unnamed source that disclosed the existence of a “direct hookup” by the NSA into an AT&T database that stores information about national phone calls, including date, duration, caller and number called, etc.

According to these allegations, AT&T simply ceded control to the NSA with total disregard for federal laws, and the constitutional rights to privacy of their customers.

Other names appearing in the lawsuit are NSA director Keith Alexander; CIA director Michael Hayden; David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff; the Department of Justice; Attorney General Michael Mukasey; former Attorneys General Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft; John McConnell, director of national intelligence; and John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence.