All the companies ruled out is direct access (and Microsoft said is if there's a voluntary program, they're not part of it; they didn't rule out an involuntary program of course).
They did not rule out even something so simple as an API, or another party doing the work for the NSA (which the NSA then taps into, ala the Palantir concept).
Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.
All the companies ruled out is direct access (and Microsoft said is if there's a voluntary program, they're not part of it; they didn't rule out an involuntary program of course).
They did not rule out even something so simple as an API, or another party doing the work for the NSA (which the NSA then taps into, ala the Palantir concept).