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The National Security Agency should complete construction of its 1 million square foot data center near Bluffdale, Utah, this year. As Wired first reported last year, its purpose is to intercept, analyze and store data passing through both domestic and foreign communications networks — including the e-mails, phone calls and Google search history of U.S. citizens.

Once complete the Utah Data Center will be the information hub in a complex surveillance network that’s been under construction for over a decade including four geostationary satellites positioned around the globe to monitor a vast spectrum of communication frequencies and secret domestic listening posts installed in various cooperating telecom firms (like AT&T and Verizon) granting them warrantless access to just about everything.

"Google admitted to 'mistakenly' collecting sensitive private data sent over WiFi networks."

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.

While most folks are looking elsewhere, Congress is trying to sneak an absolutely awful "cybersecurity" bill through Congress, permitting ISPs to funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls. The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient.

William Binney is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything — their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships — to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying; A top-secret program he says is broadly collecting Americans' personal data.

If Americans aren’t disturbed by phone carriers’ practices of handing over cell phone users’ personal data to law enforcement en masse–in many cases without a warrant–we might at least be interested to learn just how much that service is costing us in tax dollars: often hundreds or thousands per individual snooped.

They may call it the "Land of the Pure," but Pakistan turns out to be anything but. Google ranks Pakistan No. 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches per person for certain sex-related content.

Google and the Google-owned YouTube received more than 10,000 requests for user data from government agencies in the six months ending Dec. 31, 2009, according to newly released data.

"Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products," Google says on a new site that sheds more light onto government demands for user information and requests to take offensive material off the Web.