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Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates who challenged the constitutionality of the law could not show they had been harmed by it and so lacked standing to sue. Their fear that they would be subject to surveillance in the future was too speculative to establish standing, he wrote.

Justice Alito also rejected arguments based on the steps the plaintiffs had taken to escape surveillance, including traveling to meet sources and clients in person rather than talking to them over the phone. "They cannot manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipating of non-imminent harms," he wrote of the plaintiffs.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas joined the majority opinion.

In dissent, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that the harm claimed by the plaintiffs was not speculative. "Indeed," he wrote, "it is as likely to take place as are most future events that common-sense inference and ordinary knowledge of human nature tell us will happen." Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joined his dissenting opinion.

The decision, Clapper v. Amnesty International, No. 11-1025, concerned a 2008 measure that broadened the government's power to eavesdrop on international communications. The law, an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was passed after the 2005 disclosure of the Bush administration's secret program to wiretap international communications of people inside the United States without obtaining court warrants. The electronic spying, intended to help pursue terrorists, began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The 2008 law was challenged by Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups and individuals, including journalists and lawyers who represent prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The plaintiffs said the law violated their rights under the Fourth Amendment by allowing the government to intercept their international telephone calls and e-mails.

In 2011, a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled for the plaintiffs on the threshold question of whether they had standing.

Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing for the court, said the plaintiffs had shown that they had a reasonable fear that their communications would be monitored and had taken "costly measures to avoid being monitored."

The full Second Circuit declined to rehear the panel's ruling by a 6-to-6 vote.