Have you ever had to comply with a secret government request?

It is entirely likely that you wouldn't know. Such requests usually come through your legal department, are handled by a very small subset of folks in the IT dept, and don't necessarily look any different than other requests for disclosure or discovery that legal makes. It's not like some guy in a black trenchcoat shows us and says "now keep your mouth shut...this is a GOVERNMENT SECRET".

That said...I worked for a telco for a number of years, so it's a safe bet I did.

The "lawful intercept" capability available for law enforcement in the telco infrastructure is designed so that sysops could not readily detect wiretap activity. That's part of the spec. That's also why the Athens Affair was so hard to detect.

PRISM (or whatever the actual intercept system is called) is different, but it's a good bet that the design goals are not lower than previously existing intercept systems.

Nice try, Verizon.