See the people who are making these statements don't know. The only people who know are the ops teams, and they really can't tell, because they could fairly easily just disappear.
I think it's incredibly important that more people understand this. It was a somewhat obfuscated fact in the New York Times article, but it's still incredibly important to acknowledge.
The people who are making these statements aren't just winging it. They wouldn't actually make the statements before finding out if there was any substance to it. Both statements stopped well short of actually denying that the government has been wholesale mining their users data, and called for policy changes from the federal government. What do you think they found out?
Do you really believe the U.S. government is "disappearing" people?
What do you think (some) field agents of an intelligence agency do?