The FISA Court this week released a heavily-redacted copy of a July ruling that approved renewal of the bulk metadata collection on all phone calls from US phone providers under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. You'll recall that NSA collection of Verizon metadata was exposed back in June, the program coming on the heels of older revelations of wholesale monitoring of largely all real-time communications.

While companies like Yahoo and Google at least tried to put up some fight against expanding government surveillance, secret courts and gag orders, companies like AT&T and Verizon not only agreed to do what was asked -- they often agreed to take things much, much further -- including wholesale collection of every shred of data touching their networks, and even giving government agencies advice on how precisely to break wiretap and privacy law.

Considering all this, the profitability of helping government agencies snoop on U.S. citizens, and the risk of losing government contracts -- it's not too surprising that the FISA court document dump this week reiterates that none of the telcos so much as raised a single challenge in response to bulk metadata collection -- at any point:

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To date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order. Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an Order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so.

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Given Verizon and AT&T have been so quiet about all of this, it's curious that Verizon's first real comments on this issue came the same day as the FISA release. Instead of focusing on what Verizon's doing, Verizon Enterprise Solutions president John Stratton instead decided to accuse Google, Yahoo and other Silicon Valley folks of "grandstanding" because of their decision to (albeit belatedly in Microsoft's case) stand up to the government:

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"I appreciate that the consumer-centric IT firms that you referenced [Yahoo, Google, Microsoft] that it's important to grandstand a bit, and wave their arms and protest loudly so as not to offend the sensibility of their customers," Stratton said..."This is not a question that will be answered by a telecom executive, this is not a question that will be answered by an IT executive. This is a question that must be answered by societies themselves.

I believe this is a bigger issue, and press releases and fizzy statements don't get at the issue; it needs to be solved by society."

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Granted such "grandstanding" and "fizzy statements" have included trying to fight National Security Letters that gag companies from talking about data collection requests (Google), refusing to participate in PRISM entirely (Twitter) and being one of the only companies to challenge PRISM's legality in court (Yahoo). That's miles beyond what Verizon chose to do when faced with unprecedented, wholesale collection of user data under a legally dubious framework.

Perhaps Verizon was better off saying nothing, because mocking the companies who actually chose to stand up for their users doesn't seem like the brightest public relations choice.