Bullcrap. When people saw "direct access", they concluded direct access - as was reasonable, at the time, from what the leak seemed to show; I did the same. Many of the people on this site have since realized that that is not true (although there were sure a lot of crazy theories about the specific wording of the initial denials), but most of those people are no longer saying "direct access", and there are people still saying "direct access".
Personally I'm not sure we're reading the same HN. Maybe today the facts regarding Prism are finally catching up but it certainly wasn't the case yesterday or the week+ before.