By Poornima Gupta and Gerry Shih
(Reuters) - Major tech companies including Apple Inc, Google and Facebook Inc on Thursday said they do not provide any government agency with "direct access" to their servers, contradicting a Washington Post report that they have granted such access under a classified data collection program.
The newspaper reported that the U.S. National Security Agency and the FBI are "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies" through a secret program known as PRISM, and extracting massive amounts of data including audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs.
It named nine companies, including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft Corp and Google Inc, as having joined the secret program.
Google, the Internet's largest search provider, said that, despite previous reports that it had forged a "back door" for the government, it had never provided any such access to user data.
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