If this action was ruled illegal, then someone in the chain of command ordered this illegal action - in other words did something illegal. Is the individual who ordered the illegal action going to be disciplined? Is anyone?
https://sensenbrenner.house.gov/2018/3/james-clapper-not-cha...
I think the same should be true of our civil servants who wield so much power over the populace.
I can observe that something has been stolen and still not know who stole it.
This is made much more difficult with the creation of legal entities designed with the explicit purpose of shielding wrongdoers from accountability; like corporations. The idea, as we're told, is that society benefits by shielding risk-takers from accountability; and so we balance this by making it incredibly difficult to hold organizations and the individuals within accountable for their collective wrongs.
No, it's not equitably balanced.
It took a lot of back and forth in court to determine that this was illegal.
Now, if someone does it again...
Then there is the issue of having had a crime committed. A charge must be clearly defined, proved by evidence beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of the accused's peers, tried in a court with appropriate jurisdiction, and the sentence must not be deemed either cruel or unusual in nature, and they must be brought by a someone with standing. Usually an Attorney General or prosecutor, who themselves wield the power of prosecutorial nullification, or as they prefer to call it so as not to night it's sister phenomena, jury nullification, prosecutorial discretion. The official in that position iseitherelected or a political appointee, so has every reason to be highly selective in the cases that deserve their time, effort, and publicity.
Make no mistake, the halls of justice that are the courts are not by any means apolitical. To give credit where it's due, of all the branches, they are the most noteworthy for illustrating active attempts to be apolitical, but there is still much indirect political taint to be found.
A superficial look at how crimes are processed should make it obvious that people are in no sense "equal before the law."
Someone poor and black is going to have a much harder time of it than someone rich, white, and politically orthodox. Even more so if they're working for one of the TLAs.
The reality is the latter groups get the benefit of a literal stay-out-of-jail card labelled "national interest", while the former are seen as a threat to it.
But given how grim the news landscape looks like in the USA, I'm not very hopeful.