Read the articles by Post and Guardian. They published enough leaks to make clear how it works: the special court gives a blanket order, valid for as much as one year, but at least three months, under which the inteligence comunity can operate from their servers at the company site for up to one year without the company even knowing (or wanting to know) what is being requested from their servers. The court order is what's making the operation "legal" so the companies can't be held legally responsible. But that can't mean that the system doesn't exist.
> 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.
It would also be hard to square Microsoft's statement that
> In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers.
"As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than 180 days, thanks to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act adopted in 1986."
