Claims made by The Washington Post that the National Security Agency was tapping into the servers of nine tech companies for details of user activity have been denied by Google and most of the other companies alleged to be involved. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘back door’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data. While the NSA statement says that the U.S. Government is not permitted to “intentionally” target US citizens, it stops short of saying that any data uncovered in the course of investigating non-U.S. citizens could not then be used.