1. Let's accept that Facebook, Google, Yahoo et al are rapacious profit-oriented corporations who could give a crap about anything but their own self interest. Fine.
2. At this point, given the statements made, in order for there to still be some kind of "back door" direct access to all of their DBs by the NSA, it would involve direct, bald-faced, massive lies to the public about its existence by top management.
3. What would the cost be to these companies be if these were revealed to be massive lies? I'm not talking about the government granting immunity from prosecution, which most commentary seems to focus on. I'm asking, how would customers react?
Answer: Their business would blow up. Revelations of lying at this scale, completely destroying their credibility, would literally threaten the entire existence of their companies. It would be a stupendous business risk to take on.
4. What is the probability that such a massive lie would be revealed? Consider that to facilitate broad access to company datasets there would need to be a bunch of technical staff in on the conspiracy -- and not just at one company. This allegedly involves most of the major Internet companies. A whistleblower at any one of them would blow it for everyone.
So, in order for any one company to participate in the conspiracy, they would need to take a bet-your-company risk that all the other companies would keep a lid on it.
5. Finally, now that we've reviewed the downsides, what's the upside? What would the benefit to these companies be of lying? Some commentary has suggested they obtained privileged information about competitors or foreign attackers (e.g. Google & China). Ok. How does that benefit compare to the risk of nuking billions of dollars in value overnight if your company's credibility with customers is utterly destroyed?
I am all for more public oversight of the secret courts governing these requests for data. The Verizon order is extraordinarily broad, and we can't have much confidence that even the relatively small number of monitored Facebook accounts aren't abuses. But this idea that Facebook, Google etc. are lying to the public about their role just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.