[eatitraw]

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.

[DannyBee]

"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