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A federal court will be scrutinizing one of the National Security Agency’s worst spyingprograms on Monday. The case has the potential to restore crucial privacy protections for themillions of Americans who use the internet to communicate with family, friends, and othersoverseas.

The unconstitutional surveillance program at issue is called PRISM, under which the NSA, FBI,and CIA gather and search through Americans’ international emails, internet calls, and chatswithout obtaining a warrant. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on PRISM in 2013, theprogram ​included​ at least nine major internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple,and Skype. Today, it very likely includes an even broader set of companies.

The government insists that it uses this program to target foreigners, but that’s only half thepicture: In reality, it uses PRISM as a backdoor into Americans’ private communications,violating the Fourth Amendment on a massive scale. We don’t know the total number ofAmericans affected, even today, because the government has refused to provide any estimate.This type of unjustifiable secrecy has also helped the program evade public judicial review of itslegality because the government ​almost never​ tells people that it spied on them without awarrant.

Indeed, the government has a track record of failing to tell Americans about this spyingeven when the person is charged with a crime based on the surveillance. That’s one reason whythis case is so important — this time, the government has admitted to the spying.In this case, the government accused a Brooklyn man, Agron Hasbajrami, of attempting toprovide material support to a designated terrorist organization in Pakistan.

After he pleaded guilty to one of the charges, the government belatedly admitted that it had read through hisemails without a warrant.Now Mr. Hasbajrami has challenged the government’s warrantless surveillance and is asking theSecond Circuit Court of Appeals to throw out the resulting evidence.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are supporting him asfriends-of-the-court, arguing that the surveillance was unconstitutional (the brief we filed ishere​). At the hearing on Monday, we’ll explain to a three-judge panel why the FourthAmendment requires the government to get a warrant when it wants to exploit thecommunications of Americans who are swept up in PRISM.

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