In a blog post published on the official Google blog this afternoon, Google CEO Larry Page and David Drummond, Google's Chief Legal Officer, deny that Google has taken part in PRISM. In fact, they say "We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Google goes on to demand more transparency in these matters. (Because Google is all for transparency.)

But the government has confirmed the existence of PRISM. So what the hell is going on?

UPDATE 3:09 PM: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied it, too, saying he hadn't heard of PRISM before yesterday.