Where by illicit I mean "is occurring without the knowledge of Google's CEO or General Counsel, despite their publicly voiced opposition to any such program."
I'm not sure. It could be that they know about it and are gag-ordered (can't fight city hall!), or that they were intentionally left out of the loop for purposes of plausible deniability.
This is military intelligence we're talking about here, they take their mission very, very seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if there were multiple, independent, redundant programs for monitoring this data.
As 'DannyBee, himself a lawyer, pointed out a few days ago: no provision of any Federal law requires anyone to issue false statements. There are times you're prevented from saying things†, but there aren't times when NSA gets to put words in your mouth.
† ... we think; the ultimate Constitutionality of this is up in the air.
I'm sure the lying part comes automatically when you want to keep your job and you can't tell your boss that you just broke every rule the company has.
If you're saying some lower-level employee of Google was "turned" by NSA and then lied about it to their manager, we're back into "illicit access" territory.
