Uh. Sure.
I'd just like to know whether you mean the same employees of the same Department of Justice which went to court to kill the ACLU's lawsuit over the same, quite likely illegal, NSA surveillance of American citizens by asserting the state secrets privilege?
Lost in all this is, I think, the simple fact that it's entirely possible that both what some of the telephone companies and the whistleblowers who tattled on them are saying is true: that records of Americans' telephone calls are in fact being provided automatically to the NSA from within the telco's networks, and that the telcos are not, in fact, providing those records directly to the NSA, thus giving them a fig leaf to hide behind.
After all, all that's needed for that to be true is the involvement of any other government agency, a single shell corporation, or a defense contractor used as an intermediary to receive the data.
Thor Lancelot Simon snipped-for-privacy@rek.tjls.com
"We cannot usually in social life pursue a single value or a single moral aim, untroubled by the need to compromise with others." - H.L.A. Hart