In 1973 the party and its Young Socialist Alliance sued the government over the whole apparatus of surveillance and disruption. Thirteen years of litigation pried loose the burglary logs, informer files, and disruption memos, and in August 1986 Judge Thomas Griesa ruled that the FBI's burglaries, informer coverage, and disruption operations had been patently unconstitutional from the start, awarding $264,000 in damages and later enjoining the government's use of its illegally gathered files.
SWP v. Attorney General remains the most complete judicial condemnation of COINTELPRO-era political policing ever obtained — a party of a few thousand members forcing the state to admit, in court, that decades of "national security" surveillance of socialists had been lawless throughout.