The public only started learning about the legal justifications for the NSA's collection of bulk phone records last June, but we now know that at least one telecom received notice much earlier. Both declassified info and Washington Post interviews have revealed that the White House gave Sprint the secret reasoning behind the NSA's surveillance in 2010 to fend off a threatened court challenge over the program's legality. Sprint dropped its formal opposition after that, but it pushed for the declassification last year as a retort to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court claims that there had been no court challenges. There might not have been a legal battle, a government official tells the Post, but there were still doubts.