It seems likely to me that as long as the NSA and cohorts were content to analyse data in order to detect terrorist threats, nobody was too bothered about it -- no doubt ISPs, Google, etc routinely comply.

But when it became obvious that they were targeting people -- Poitras, Appelbaum, and Uncle Tom Cobbley and all -- who were clearly not terrorists but were concerned about surveillance, then some of these companies drew the line, it seems.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}