No, not true. There are government and non-government attacks. Even if we assume cloud services are more vulnerable to government snooping, we need to also consider that many more companies and individuals suffer more damage from regular criminal hackers than from the NSA. Avoiding a small risk by increasing your exposure to a large risk is not rational.

Generally this is a good point but I think it's not relevant in this case. The author of discussed article claims that they do business with governments and the knowledge that US government can access their data just by asking their provider to give it to them is not some 'small risk' that you might want to accept to avoid something worse - it's a deal breaker. Expose yourself like that and you have no business.

The problem this, and many articles are missing: it isn't that the gov is taking the data from the cloud providers' servers. It's that the gov is mirroring all internet traffic and backing it all up.Thus they don't have to gain access to a cloud provider... let alone to a closet server, to get your traffic/emails.