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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

It's not the phrase "direct access" (which they could reasonably use given it was used in the original leak story), but rather the construction of the whole sentence.

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.

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There are millions of ways to deny things.

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.

I accused you of doing X on mondays. You could say "You know, in fact, I do X, but on tuesdays". Most hypocrites however will take your question as literally as possible and will just say: "No, I don't do X on mondays".

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.

"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. "

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

No it isn't. You can run it through plagiarism software which is specifically designed to take into account scenarios like your suggest and it'll be flagged.

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.

Because it is plagiarism. Do you honestly believe the PR people who wrote this didn't also read what others wrote? I don't think they released their statements all the same second.

It is the phrase 'direct access'. It basically makes the whole sentence meaningless (i.e. whatever the truth is, the statement is defensible).

Here's an example of how a government agency could get indirect access to phone data...

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.

> they could have discussed it beforehand and co-ordinated messages without there having been any government involvement

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.

Who says they did it independently? I'm sure the people who wrote each statement read the others that had been previously released.

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