It's important to remember that there are many companies involved here. PalTalk's direct access could be a begrudgingly set up teletype of live chat transcripts

It's important to remember that there are many companies involved here. PalTalk's direct access could be a begrudgingly set up teletype of live chat transcripts while Apple could have provided a VPN connection and a root password. We don't know yet know what access was sufficient to be a part of the "direct access" Prism program. It will be interesting to see what degree of commitment each of these companies showed to the privacy of its users. It appears that however Twitter was complying with requests, it wasn't as convenient for the NSA as Prism access...