sometimes data spills in your favor...

[coderman]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72811-0.html

[abridged]
"""
... Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up,
accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked "top secret." And
it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.

You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two
months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back
and orders you to forget you ever saw it.

... al-Buthi and Al-Haramain's American branch were added to the
government's public list of terrorists on Sept. 9, 2004, just weeks
after the government turned over the call log to the charity's
attorneys. It's not clear when officials realized they'd given a
highly classified document to an organization they considered
terrorist, but the FBI showed up at Belew's office in October and
demanded the call log back, advising the lawyer not to attempt to
remember the document's contents.

By then, Belew had given a copy of the document to Washington Post
reporter David Ottaway, who had been writing about how the government
investigated and listed individuals and groups suspected of funding
terrorism. Ottaway did not report on the classified call log, and when
the FBI called, the Post dutifully handed over its copy.

That might have been the end of it. But in December 2005 The New York
Times revealed that the government had been spying on Americans'
overseas communications without warrants, and Al-Haramain's lawyers
realized why the FBI had been so adamant about getting the document
back.

"I got up in the morning and read the story, and I thought, 'My god,
we had a log of a wiretap and it may or may not have been the NSA and
on further reflection it was NSA," says Thomas Nelson, who represents
Al-Haramain and Belew. "So we decided to file a lawsuit."
"""