According to a report in The Guardian, the phone companies are continuing to guard their silence over the controversial gathering of metadata by the NSA, despite the increasingly open approach by those at the centre of the bulk surveillance programme. The report states the secretive foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court last week declassified its legal reasoning for approving the NSA telephone metadata programme periodically over the past six years. Verizon, the telecoms giant that was revealed in June to be under a secret Fisa court order to hand over details of the phone records of millions of its US customers, was one of the firms that declined to answer questions relating to the legality of the scheme. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile US also declined to comment, the report notes, setting them at odds with Internet companies in a similar position who have adopted a more bullish stance towards the NSA. Full report in The Guardian