No, there's really nothing suspicious about the almost instant complete mass denial.
It sometimes takes months for these companies to come up with a full public statement on any privacy scandal. The process of getting hold of the people with enough clearance to be able to deny alone takes time. Let alone ensure that the statement is approved by senior management and legal.
Usually the best statement you can get within 24 hours is "we're taking these allegations very seriously and are looking into it".
This very much feels like a scripted response to an anticipated scenario.
> No, there's really nothing suspicious about the almost instant complete mass denial.
True, because there was no "complete mass denial". There were very focussed, specific denials from different providers of certain procedural and mechanical claims (that they provided customer information as part of a "voluntary program" or without court orders or that they provided government officials direct access to the providers servers to access customer information), but no denials of the central allegation, that each of the providers has been providing the government with a collection of information for their entire customer base and that that information gets pushed into the government collection directly from the providers servers.
It sometimes takes months for these companies to come up with a full public statement on any privacy scandal. The process of getting hold of the people with enough clearance to be able to deny alone takes time. Let alone ensure that the statement is approved by senior management and legal.
Usually the best statement you can get within 24 hours is "we're taking these allegations very seriously and are looking into it".
This very much feels like a scripted response to an anticipated scenario.