What's ludicruous is thinking the Feds are tapping every major telecom provider, but wouldn't do the same to Facebook / Google / Apple / Microsoft. These companies are collectively vastly more important than AT&T and Verizon, worth about a cool trillion dollars, and now make-up a huge portion of the data infrastructure for American consumers.
A spy is given instructions in case of interrogation by the enemy. Why wouldn't a $250 billion corporation be given instruction in case one of the largest spying systems in history hits the public news? It's absurd to think they wouldn't be.
Are you kidding me?
In any case of accidental exposure of a covert government operation involving many such parties, there would be instructions how to handle the media.
Those could be known in advance (at least for some cases), or they would get a call in case of emergency with instructions on what they are allowed to reveal and how to say it.
It's not different than what would happen at a multinational if there was some embarrassing incident related to one branch (e.g a costly in human lives accident). The legal/marketing team would reach to each branch pronto, with instructions what to say to the media. So, if the media get the manager of the, say, Canadian, branch, he would say more or less what the manager of the German branch would tell to his media.
The only "ludicrous" thing is your misplaced scepticism -- as if things thing isn't both obvious and something that's standard practice to media handling from entities of any scale...
I think that explanation strikes an appropriate balance of competence and incompetence.
1) The heads of these companies had a conference call this morning and agreed on a 4-paragraph format, with specific points for each paragraph.
Or 2) The federal government instructed each company to respond today, with a 4-paragraph point-by-point, and then Larry and Mark obediently complied.
Ludicrous.