Believing herself to be a possible target of the National Security Agency’s controversial electronic surveillance program, criminal defense attorney Nancy Hollander unhappily took a three-day trip to the Middle East to secure documents that she otherwise would have obtained electronically.

“I couldn’t just call and say, ‘Send me this document,’” said the past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and a partner in Freedman Boyd Daniels Hollander & Goldberg in Albuquerque, N.M. “A three-day trip to the West Bank was not my idea of fun.”