If U.S. telecom companies have the capacity to challenge government requests for their customer data, why haven’t they done so?

More than two days after a declassified opinion from the secretive court that overseas the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs said that the absence of challenges by these companies—including Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and others—is among the reasons it continues to approve authorization for the bulk collection of this kind of data, none of these corporate entities have commented publicly about how they perceive the legality of such programs.

“To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order,” wrote FISA court Judge Clair V. Eagan in her “declassified” ruling, written on August 29 of this year and released to the public in redacted form on Tuesday.

However, trying to obtain clarification on exactly how these giant firms interpret the requests from the NSA, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington hit a dead end.

As the newspaper reports, the companies were asked how they “could justify to their own customers the decision not to challenge the court orders, in stark contrast to some internet companies such as Yahoo, which have contested the legality of NSA collection of their customers’ data.”