The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants the Department of Justice to disclose whether it has ever issued secret orders to technology companies to decrypt data on their consumers' devices. The foundation filed a lawsuit yesterday that claims the DOJ must disclose any secret surveillance warrants it has obtained Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).

Even though the FISC operates in secret and its decisions are classified, certain opinions must be declassified in accordance with the USA PATRIOT Act, but the EFF alleges the DOJ has failed to do so.

"If the government is obtaining FISC orders to force a company to build backdoors or decrypt their users' communications, the public has a right to know about those secret demands to compromise people's phones and computers," EFF attorney Nate Cardozo said in a statement.

The lawsuit stems from two Freedom of Information Act requests that the EFF filed in October 2015 and last month. The October request was denied, and the EFF claims that the DOJ has not substantively replied to its March request by the required 20-day deadline.

The high profile of the recent spat between the DOJ and Apple over whether the iPhone maker should be required to unlock the phone of the San Bernardino attacker also factored into the decision to file a lawsuit, the EFF said.

It's no secret that that the government is using the secret FISC to file data requests, though tech companies have won more leeway in how they can disclose them. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act originally required companies to remain quiet about having received any such orders. Later, they were allowed to include them in aggregate reports of all the data requests they received from the government. But in response to multiple lawsuits from Google and other tech companies, the DOJ announced an agreement in 2014 that allows companies to break out bulk numbers of orders they receive from the FISC.

As for the San Bernardino case, the FBI went before Congress on Tuesday to defend the third-party assistance it received in unlocking the attacker's iPhone. FBI Assistant Director Amy Hess testified that it's not always feasible for the agency to break encryption on its own.

"For example, one potential approach involves the exploitation of vulnerabilities previously unknown to the device or software manufacturer in order to gain access to information contained within or protected by it," Hess said. "Identifying these vulnerabilities and developing lawful intercept or lawful access solutions can take an unacceptable amount of time, require significant skill and resources, and the results of these efforts can be ephemeral, at best."

At the same hearing, Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell denied rumors that Apple provided unlocking assistance to Chinese authorities. "I want to be very clear on this," Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell said, according to Reuters. "We have not provided source code to the Chinese government."