But no individual at Google felt that even an anonymous tip to a reporter about the program was warranted? Doesn't add up.

What makes you think the majority of Google employees had any idea this was going on? We have the testimony of several Google employees who comment here on Hacker News that there was no indication any of this was happening.

Then there's the news report that corroborates this, implying not even the leaders of the companies had any idea.

I mean, again, they could all be lying...but Occam's Razor and all that.

I wrote this in an attempt to trace the problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6078124

Maybe the world is a bit more random than one in which overarching conspiracies rule everything. Snowden was pretty random, no? He could have stayed put and sold his data, or simply kept his mouth shut, but he did what he did when he did it. There are a lot of other people working there, and none of them were the ones to expose all of that crap. So maybe the people at Google valued their jobs more than doing the right thing. That hardly makes for some big plot.

Your statement only makes sense if you make the logical leap that Google does the things you are implying they do. The fact that none of Google's 100k+ employees and former employees have ever leaked anything of this nature is a strong indicator that it's not actually happening.

Perhaps, but then how do you explain the history of lawsuits?