If the NSA obtained a secret court order requiring the companies to hand over the data, then of course statements that they only provide data when required to do so by law would also be true … Google hands over meta-data to the NSA which says account X emailed accounts Y and Z with this content, and the three of them also had Google Hangouts together on these dates. No message content was provided by Google, and because Google doesn’t supply the account names, none of it counts as ‘user data’.