So your first post seems to say"the CEOs could plausibly not have known" and this post seems to say "of course the CEOs went along with it!" Which is an entirely different claim. Could you clarify?
It's not binary. I'm considering a range of situations which explain both the denials and the NSA lawyer's report.
The CEOs might know, and think it safe to lie. (That's the "First" part of the topmost post.) They might not know because the NSA only approached targeted lower employees, and the combination of the law and the company's own structure prevents the full decision/compliance from every being told to the CEO. (That's the "Second" part of the topmost post.)
And the reason that the don't "know" could be that the NSA is really good at a targeted approach, or that the CEO has helped by making sure enough people to make the NSA happy are empowered and compartmentalized to do so, without it getting back to him. In such a case, he honestly doesn't "know" exactly whether or how much the NSA is poking around, but that's ignorance-by-design.
If the government were angry at a CEO engineering such ignorance to avoid criminal liability, they'd prosecute under the theory of willful blindness:
