The Washington Post reported the latest revelations about NSA surveillance last week, writing that the spy agency intercepted data from Google and Yahoo's private "clouds" by tapping into fiber optic cables overseas. And despite NSA pushback stating otherwise, the Post is standing by its story.

In light of the data tapping piece, the government's response took a different tack than what's been seen over the past several months. It didn't say the disclosures were damaging to national security or irresponsible; they just flat-out said the stories were wrong.

Asked about reports that the NSA "broke into Google and Yahoo databases worldwide," Gen. Keith Alexander said flatly "that's never happened." He continued, "I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers."

That was talking around the story a bit since The Post story didn't actually say that the NSA accessed servers directly. Instead, it said that the organization worked together with GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, to get Google and Yahoo data from the connections between the Internet companies' data centers.

Last Thursday, the NSA put out a statement that "recent press articles" had "misstated facts, mischaracterized NSA’s activities, and drawn erroneous inferences." It said overseas activity was within the law and focused on "targets of foreign intelligence value."

So today, the Post published a follow-up article on its Switch blog that is essentially an extended riposte to suggestions that it was wrong. It also published additional slides that show the NSA knew about internal Google data structures. The Post consulted with experts who had "detailed knowledge of the internal corporate networks of each company." And those experts confirmed that NSA slides like the one above "included samples of data structures and formats that never travel unencrypted on the public Internet."