The Trump administration is breaking the law after being more than a month overdue on declassifying a court opinion on the surveillance of U.S. citizens, according to two senators and a coalition of civil liberties groups.Release of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion has been closely tied to reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lapsed this summer, although collection authority has continued under another court ruling that runs through March of next year.Under Section 702, the government can warrantlessly search foreign targets’ electronic and phone communications using the personal information of Americans who have been in contact with them.In the FISC opinion that the administration has not declassified, a judge objected to tools the government has created to let analysts process messages. The objection reportedly was over a filtering system that allowed analysts to get information in a way that should be counted as a query of Americans’ information, which is subject to extra protections.Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who co-authored a letter to administration officials Monday with Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., had previously said the opinion shows “major compliance problems” and had objected to a short-term reauthorization of Section 702 until officials agreed to release it.“As Congress continues to debate the fate of this authority, lawmakers must be able to discuss these abuses openly,” Wyden and Schiff wrote to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Otherwise, the American people will rightly question whether a government that so flagrantly violates basic legal requirements, like the statute requiring declassification, can ever be trusted to not abuse a powerful surveillance tool like Section 702.”The Senate duo and the coalition of civil liberties groups in a separate letter to congressional leaders said that under the law, the letter was due Sept. 13. Blanche had previously committed to declassify the letter to lawmakers by the statutory deadline. The letter was also overdue by another measurement, with the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee saying that they expected the declassification and release by May 15.A spokesperson for Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., didn’t respond to a request for comment, but the office of the leader of the Democratic side of the panel, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, did.“The Vice Chairman has been clear that he supports transparency with regard to Section 702 of FISA,” a spokesperson, Rachel Cohen, said in a statement to CyberScoop. “This is precisely why he and Chairman Cotton urged then-DNI [Tulsi] Gabbard in March to declassify the March 17 FISC opinion. Unfortunately, neither Director Gabbard nor Acting Director [Bill] Pulte were responsive, but Senator Warner expects that DNI Clayton will declassify the opinion, consistent with the bipartisan SSCI letter and as required by law.”Failure to declassify the opinion should be fatal to reauthorizing the expired surveillance law, the civil liberties groups wrote.“Congress should refuse to support any reauthorization of Section 702 while the administration actively withholds legally mandated information about how the surveillance program operates,” they wrote. “Further, it must stop relying on executive branch self-policing to protect Americans’ rights and reauthorize Section 702 only with a warrant requirement to access Americans’ private communications.”The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.The post Senators, rights groups say Trump administration breaking law by withholding surveillance court opinion appeared first on CyberScoop.