Almost every large tech company with email, search and app capacity denied reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian that claimed the U.S. government tracked the activities of citizens as a way to detect terrorism or other threats to national security. Companies that included Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG), Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) denied the reporting by the two papers, which was picked up across the media world.

People are now left to ponder whether important media misstated the extent of the government’s “spying” or whether much of the rumored “spying” actually happened. And they are left to decide if major media were right or wrong about which companies were targeted by the government for data collection

A sampling of some reactions:

From Reuters:

With regard to the Post:

Some of the companies named in the article — Google, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook — immediately denied that the government had “direct access” to their central servers. Microsoft said it does not voluntarily participate in any government data collection and only complies “with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said the report contained “numerous inaccuracies.”

The NY Times:

The federal government has been secretly collecting information on foreigners overseas for nearly six years from the nation’s largest Internet companies like Google, Facebook and, most recently, Apple, in search of national security threats, the director of national intelligence confirmed Thursday night.

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