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ByEricTucker The Associated Press WASHINGTON While Con- gress mulls how to cur- tail the NSA's collection of Americans' telephone re- cords, impatient civil lib- erties groups are looking to legal challenges already underway in the courts to limit government surveil- lance powers. Three appeals courts are hearing lawsuits against the bulk phone records program, creating the po- tential for an eventual Su- preme Court review. Judges in lower courts, meanwhile, are grappling with the ad- missibility of evidence gained through the NSA's warrantless surveillance. Advocates say the flurry of activity, which follows revelations last year by for- mer NSA contractor Ed- ward Snowden of once-se- cret intelligence programs, show how a post-9/11 sur- veillance debate once pri- marily hashed out among lawmakers in secret is be- ing increasingly aired in open court — not only in New York and Washington but in places like Idaho and Colorado. "The thing that is differ- ent about the debate right now is that the courts are much more of a factor in it," said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the Amer- ican Civil Liberties Union. Before the Snowden disclo- sures, he said, courts were generally relegated to the sidelines of the discussion. Now, judges are poised to make major decisions on at least some of the matters in coming months. Though it's unclear whether the Supreme Court will weigh in, the cases are proceeding at a time when the justices appear increas- ingly comfortable with dig- ital privacy matters — in- cluding GPS tracking of cars and police searches of cellphones. The cases "come at a critical turning point for the Supreme Court when it comes to expectations of privacy and digital in- formation," said American University law professor Stephen Vladeck. Revelations that the gov- ernment was collecting phone records of millions of Americans who were not suspected of crimes forced a rethinking of the prac- tice, and President Barack Obama has called for it to end. Since then, the House has passed legislation that civil libertarians say did not go far enough. In the Senate, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Com- mittee chairman, is seek- ing a vote on a stricter mea- sure to ban bulk collection, and it has bipartisan back- ing and support from the White House. As Congress considers the matter, the federal judi- ciary has produced divided opinions. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Ap- peals recently heard ar- guments in an appeal of a judge's opinion that had upheld the program's legal- ity. The D.C. appeals court hears arguments next week after a judge there found that the program is proba- bly unconstitutional. Anna Smith, a nurse in Idaho who contends the program is un- constitutional and she is at risk of having her records collected, will soon have her appeal heard by the appeals court in the 9th Circuit. And a Somali cab driver convicted in California of funneling money to a ter- ror group is challenging a phone records program the government said was vital for his prosecution. Any court opinion be- fore Congress takes action could influence the law- makers' debate. Congress could also act first, but even if it clears up ques- tions about the govern- ment's statutory authority to collect phone records, courts might still confront constitutional questions. CIVIL LIBERTIES CASES NSAsurveillancechallenges moving through courts THEASSOCIATEDPRESS Former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden speaks in Moscow in this image from video released by WikiLeaks. By Seth Borenstein The Associated Press WASHINGTON The BP oil spill left an oily "bathub ring" on the sea floor that's about the size of Rhode Is- land, new research shows. The study by David Val- entine, the chief scientist on the federal damage assess- ment research ships, esti- mates that about 10 million gallons of oil coagulated on the floor of the Gulf of Mex- ico around the damaged Deepwater Horizons oil rig. Valentine, a geochem- istry professor at the Uni- versity of California Santa Barbara, said the spill from the Macondo well left other splotches containing even more oil. He said it is ob- vious where the oil is from, even though there were no chemical signature tests be- cause over time the oil has degraded. "There's this sort of ring where you see around the Macondo well where the concentrations are ele- vated," Valentine said. The study, published in Mon- day's Proceedings of the Na- tional Academy of Sciences, calls it a "bathtub ring." Oil levels inside the ring were as much as 10,000 timeshigherthanoutsidethe 1,200-square-mile ring, Val- entine said. A chemical com- ponent of the oil was found on the sea floor, anywhere from two-thirds of a mile to a mile below the surface. The rig blew on April 20, 2010, and spewed 172 mil- lion gallons of oil into the Gulf through the summer. Scientists are still trying to figure where all the oil went and what effects it had. BP questions the con- clusions of the study. In an email, spokesman Ja- son Ryan said, "the au- thors failed to identify the source of the oil, leading them to grossly overstate the amount of residual Ma- condo oil on the sea floor and the geographic area in which it is found." 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