A federal judge in Brooklyn demanded yesterday that a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer tell what he knows about possible government eavesdropping on conversations between eight former terror suspects now suing the government and their attorneys.

At least one other judge, this time in Virginia, has also called on government lawyers to disclose whether a specific person was targeted by the government’s contentious post-September 11 wiretapping program. But lawyers involved in the civil lawsuit said the ruling by Magistrate Steven Gold of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn may be first time a judge specifically asked the government to discuss intercepted attorney-client communications.

The 2002 lawsuit before Magistrate Gold involved Muslim men who had been rounded up after September 11, 2001, but never charged with any terror-related activity. The eight detainees listed as plaintiffs were deported only after months of cruel treatment by prison guards, the complaint states. Attorney Rachel Meeropol, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, represents them.

“I have no knowledge of nor received any information along those lines,” the Justice Department lawyer, Stephen Handler, said of any government eavesdropping efforts against Ms. Meeropol and her clients.

Magistrate Gold also ordered Mr. Handler to learn if his witnesses in the coming trial had been privy to any warrantless eavesdropping against Ms. Meeropol’s communications with her clients.

“I want to know that no member of the trial team is aware of the activity,” Magistrate Gold said. “I want a commitment that no information culled by these means will be used in the litigation of this case.”

Ms. Meeropol said the possibility that the government eavesdrops on her conversations has made her preparations for trial more burdensome.

“We have to be concerned that the conversations we have by e-mail and telephone are not secure,” Ms. Meeropol told The New York Sun. “That means that to the degree we can we have to change our behavior by spending more money and time to communicate with our client.”

She is also plaintiff in a suit against President Bush filed two months ago in federal court in Manhattan over the National Security Agency’s program of warrantless wiretapping.

Ms. Meeropol also has asked Mr. Handler to disclose whether the government videotaped or recorded four of the plaintiffs in the suit when they returned briefly to America in January to be deposed. At that time, the four men were secretly stashed in a hotel and monitored by federal agents.

A former U.S. attorney general, John Ashcroft, who is named as a defendant in this case, may be questioned about government eavesdropping in the coming trial.

Magistrate Gold indicated that he would not order the government to produce any recordings of conversations that were contained in an intelligence database so long as the lawyers and witnesses in the case were not privy to them.

Law professors said Magistrate Gold’s decision is in tune with the rulings of the few other judges who have examined President Bush’s wiretapping program. While no court has yet ruled on the legality of such wiretapping, the decisions of individual judges nonetheless indicate how they feel about the matter.

“What this episode reveals more generally is that throughout the legal system this information is considered tainted,” a professor of law at Hofstra University, Eric Freedman, said.