Good point. If they can force companies to lie about the existence of FISA requests, why wouldn't they force them to lie about the number of such?
Again, i have seen this in argument after argument. Nobody has yet provided any legal authority that states it is constitutional or legal for the government to compel forced lies. They can compel silence, for sure.
There is plenty of authority in other contexts (IE not national security), that the government cannot compel you to speak misleading or non-truthful information.
I wish this idea that everyone must be lying because the government can legally, force them to, would stop.
I imagine someone started with the NSL gag orders, which compel silence, and then just started saying they compel you to lie instead (which they don't).
In fact, even the compel silence part of the NSL was found unconstitutional.
And don't bother trying to work out how the law allows this, we're not even allowed to know what some of the laws even are.
What laws do you think you can't know of, exactly?
Which is not to say Google or anyone else is lying about the nature or the scope or anything else about the requests they have received. But the problem is that we can't ever know one way or the other, because we have apparently created a system of secrecy and dishonesty. Once you know someone (in this case, the intelligence community, and those they compel) has a history of lying to you, how do you move past that back into a state of trust?
EDIT: well, technically it says not to 'bear false witness against thy neighbor', but it certainly would not be hard to justify a religious objection to that requirement.