Private posts in a specific category?

I’m trying to keep a particular category of posts private.

Is this possible?

What I mean by private is that only a subset of registered users can post or comment in this particular category. I don’t care who reads the posts.

There is a user_status field in the users table, and I was thinking this could be used in conjunction with the cat_id. This means manually entering a user_status for the special users, but that can be done.

The pseudocode might like this:

if (user_status == cat_id) then you can post in this category, else you can’t.

Is there an easier way? Other suggestions?

Thanks.