Is the NSA Using Google to Spy on Account Holders?

Last the week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) aimed at discovering the content of all electronic correspondence between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA).
The source of the controversy was a "highly sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack targeting Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists in 2010.
To counter the Chinese government’s hacking of its customers’ accounts, Google changed Gmail’s privacy settings to automatically encrypt all traffic to and from its servers.
In the days following the attacks, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, warned that attacks prompted the Internet behemoth to "review the feasibility of our business operations in China." Google, continued Drummond, was "no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."
In a blog post, Drummond also wrote that other companies might have been targeted and that he was “working with the relevant U.S. authorities.” It’s the identity of these American “authorities” and the extent of their involvement in the Google attacks that prompted EPIC’s filing of an FOIA petition.
In the petition, EPIC seeks copies of all communications between the NSA and Google regarding the latter’s efforts at beefing up its cybersecurity. The NSA challenged EPIC’s request by submitting a Glomar Response. In such a maneuver, the entity that is the subject of the FOIA inquiry “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of the material requested.
Named for a ship built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly recover a sunken Soviet submarine, a Glomar Response typically is given in two scenarios. First, where a refusal to forward the documents would have the effect of admitting that they actually exist, thus compromising national security. Second, law enforcement agencies will give a Glomar Response when producing the requested information would stigmatize a person named in the documents being sought.
In defense of its Glomar parry, the NSA invoked Exemption 3 of FOIA and Section 6 of the National Security Agency Act, which reads in relevant part:

[N]othing in this Act or any other law…shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the National Security Agency, or any information with respect to the activities thereof, or of the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency.

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