An unnamed phone company recently resisted a National Security Agency demand for access to its subscribers' data, according to court documents declassified Friday.

But on March 20, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected the company's motion and ordered it to continue turning the records over to the NSA. The government redacted the name of the company and other information from the documents.

It was apparently the first time any phone company tried to fight the NSA's controversial mass-surveillance program. A federal judge wrote last year that no phone company had resisted the program, which the NSA claims is authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Last December, Judge Richard Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with a conservative activist and ruled that the NSA's bulk collection of phone records is unconstitutional.

"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary' invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval," Judge Leon wrote.

In the 31-page ruling, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the FISC directly rejected Judge Leon's reasoning, calling it "unpersuasive." Citing the 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland, she concluded that people have no Fourth Amendment rights over the metadata that they share with phone companies.