Yahoo: "We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers"
AOL: "nor do we provide any government agency with access to our servers."
Paltalk: "Paltalk does not provide any government agency with direct access to its servers"
Apple: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers"
Can't win with you guys.
There are millions of ways you could phrase the response (Dropbox and Microsoft used completely different language), the chance that these five came up with the phrasing used independently seems fairly low. Especially as the statements weren't all given to a single reporter (who could have phrased the question in a particular way) but rather to a variety of different news sources.
It could still be completely innocent, they could all have cribbed off whoever did the first denial or they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement.
It is however something that needs explaining.
These are after all companies several (all?) of whom have co-ordinated illegal no-hire compacts in the past: it's not far-fetched to think they'd work together on a PR response to this. Which isn't necessarily to rule out a more sinister explanation of course.
This is the most clear and direct way
I accused you of doing X
You could say "you know, my brother and I, we once, 30 years ago blah blah blah blah blah blah but X, X never happened".
Most people, however, will just say "No, i don't do X".
They were accused, point blank, of providing direct access to their servers. They said "we do not provide direct access to their servers".
But please, see a conspiracy here because people are trying to be as direct and clear.
You see, people don't want to know if government has direct access(ok, they want, but it is not their primary concern), they want to know what happened.
It simply doesn't matter if google uploads data to government servers or government gets data from google servers by "directly accessing" them. I would even guess that the latter is simpler to implement and maintain.
I don't mean that google is happy to hand user data to government - they probably aren't - I want to know how many data governments gets.
The companies are saying they have no idea. They literally said "we've never heard of this program". What more do you want?
The claim the newspapers made, in line 1, was, "the government has direct access". The denial made was "the government does not have direct access".
If they want to publish a different claim, i'm sure a different denial will be written.
If you want to know what happened, why are you asking GOogle? Go ask the NSA
For example why do they all use the word "provide" there are hundreds of synonyms that work just as well ("given", "enabled", "allowed", "have", etc.). They weren't accused of "providing" the access, it's a word they've chosen to use.
The specific accusation was about the NSA, why are the denials using "government agencies" or synonyms rather than NSA. There might be perfectly valid reasons, but the chance that they'd all make the same decision to use it independently ?
Why are they all in current tense rather than "we have never x" ?
If there were on or two similarities it might be coincidence, but we're talking about dozens of grammatically and phrasing choices.
Amdocs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) provides billing services and customer support for most of the major phone companies so it has access to all of the transactional data on your billing statement. If a government agency had access to the Amdocs data, it would have access to the phone data through an indirect channel.
And it is kind of true: "We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers" is the clearest construction I can imagine for denying involvement, but they get called out for it anyway.
"Can't win with you guys."
I mean, not much more you can do than just laugh at shit like this. Yeah man, everyone here is so unreasonable with their standard of "I don't like when companies blatantly lie" how hypocritical of them?
and don't tell me that hasn't happened before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-...
There's also shit ton of papers on Chines academia on how to reconstruct and rapid classify packets from raw IP dumps
Edit: THIS -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843442 Beam splitters, or 分光 as called in Chinese.
Wish I had been a fly on the wall when they where instructed on what to say and how to phrase it. It is certainly no accident that they came out on the same day, with the same phrasing, etc