Question to the more experienced hackers here:

Would such a massive undertaking be possible without the knowledge of the regular developers working at these companies? Some big names on that list, like Facebook (and I think Dropbox was 'coming soon'). If developers at these companies knew about these measures, I'm really skeptical in believing that it took an intelligence officer to expose this story. Chances would be much higher of devs at these companies (chances being good that some of them are the reddit/HN libertarian types) would have exposed this long ago.

Is such an operation feasible without the knowledge of hundreds of Google/facebook/other engineers?