The EFF says another court refuses to dismiss NSA spying case and that’s always good news. Two things for you to do to help:

1. Call your Congresspeople and stop Sen. Spector from passing S. 2453 which would curtail exactly this kind of judicial oversight.
2. Consider using GPG—the GNU Privacy Guard—if you feel the need to scramble your data or authenticate with cryptographic signatures. Don’t rely on proprietary encryption software. You’ll never know if you’re using something with a backdoor in it or something far weaker than you think it is. There are quite a few introductions to GPG online and a couple of books from O’Reilly if you prefer bound volumes (one older, one newer). GPG can’t prevent your phone records or Internet connections from being discovered, but it can make it more difficult to know what you said in email or what’s in your encrypted files.