So much drama! So much scrambling for alternatives at the last minute! So much nostalgia for those days when everyone had a blog and every post was brilliant and the future seemed so bright ... Wait, did that actually happen? Maybe I'm getting carried away.

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The Guardian has since published a follow-up story that reports that "The president of the European parliament has called for full clarification from the US over claims it bugged EU offices in America and accessed computer networks."

From earlier:

The NSA has been working with at least seven European other countries to collect personal communications data, according to Wayne Madsen, a former NSA contractor who has come forward because he thinks the public should not be "kept in the dark." According to Madsen, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all have formed secret agreements with the US to submit sensitive data.

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After it was revealed two weeks ago that the National Security Agency collects domestic emails, chats, photos, and call records through two surveillance operations, PRISM and BLARNEY, hundreds of Americans filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to find out what of their personal data has been gathered.

If the NSA’s response to one such request from San Francisco-based web developer Jarrett Streebin is any indicator, those FOIA filings will likely be in vain.

“To the extent that your request seeks any metadata/call detail records on you and/or any telephone numbers provided in your request, or seeks intelligence information on you, we cannot acknowledge the existence or non-existence of such metadata or call detail records,” the agency wrote Streebin.

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If you've never heard of the PCLOB, you're not alone. We hadn't either, and that's probably because the Bush and Obama administrations have done everything they can to keep it that way. As the Hill's Justin Sink reports, the board was created eight years ago on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, but has "remained largely powerless" thanks to White House obstruction. Indeed, this is one of the board's first meetings, as Sink reports:

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Within minutes of the release of two new documents describing the NSA's policies on what communications data can be gathered without a warrant, privacy geeks seized upon one particular passage:

In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data bases requires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis....

In other words, as Cato fellow Julian Sanchez tweeted, if you use encryption to make your communications private, and the NSA discovers that, it can grab your data and hold on to it until it cracks the code.

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Hey, look, Google not being evil! Kind of. The news sent an electric shock through a community of privacy activists and advocates who had already spent a busy morning being exasperated by a vigorous government defense of the NSA's surveillance activities mounted during a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence hearing.

Questions of morality aside, what Google is really trying to do is protect its reputation. The legal filing asserts that on June 6, the Guardian newspaper "published a story mischaracterizing the scope and nature of Google's receipt of and compliance with foreign intelligence surveillance requests. In particular, the story falsely alleged that Google provides the U.S. government with "direct access" to its systems, allowing the government unfettered access to the records and communications of millions of user (sic)."

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“Some people say, ‘Well, you know, Obama was this raving liberal before. Now he’s, you know, Dick Cheney.’ Dick Cheney sometimes says, ‘Yeah, you know? He took [Bush-Cheney policies] all lock, stock and barrel,'” Obama said. "My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather are we setting up a system of checks and balances.”

He continued to defend the NSA's phone surveillance program, by contending that the agency is not listening to Americans' phone calls. "The way I view it, my job is both to protect the American people and to protect the American way of life, which includes our privacy. And so every program that we engage in, what I’ve said is 'Let’s examine and make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs.'” Obama continued: "What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls, and the NSA cannot target your emails … and have not."

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Such news, by itself, isn't particularly amazing. It's not even the first time a Chinese supercomputer has held the top ranking. The Tianhe-1 grabbed the pole position in November 2010 and held it until June 2011. Previously, Japan and the United States had traded places since 1993. Supercomputing speed follows roughly the same trajectory as Moore's Law -- it doubles about every 14 months. There will always be new contenders for the throne.

But this month, there's a new context for news about the debut of ever more powerful supercomputers. Consider the first comment left on Reddit to a thread announcing the exploits of Tianhe-2:

This would be a pretty awesome tool for churning through millions of phone records and digital copies of people's online data.

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A roundup of major takeaways:

On why he waited to release the documents until now 

Obama's campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

On Google and Facebook denials about providing government officials direct access to servers

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Here is an alternate suggestion:

"Why the Defense of Government Surveillance by my Cato Colleagues is Misinformed, Dangerous, and Completely Misses The Point."

Sanchez also buries his most powerful analysis. The majority of his piece reads like a compelling legal brief, a point-by-point demolition of the argument that the government's ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of data about millions of Americans is properly constrained and legally justified. But then, near the end, he explains why this is such an important debate to have right now. Society will always struggle with the challenge of finding the proper balance between "state control and citizen autonomy," he writes. But...

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From the Hill:

The Senate held its last vote of the week a little after noon on Thursday, and many lawmakers were eager to take advantage of the short day and head back to their home states for Father’s Day weekend.

Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity. The room on the lower level of the Capitol Visitor Center is large enough to fit the entire Senate membership, according to a Senate aide.

The Hill doesn't know who attended the briefing and who didn't, but it would be interesting to know what proud father Jeff Flake decided to do.

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Clemons spoke on Steve Kornacki's "Up with Steve," joined by Ana Marie Cox and Spencer Ackerman from The Guardian, and Washington Post Columnist Matt Miller to discuss the effectiveness of NSA's surveillance program.

While the panelists debated whether the loss in privacy from surveillance results in increased security, Cox posed another relationship between the two ideals:

"It's an imperfect world that we live in, and sometimes I think of privacy and security as being an arm's race. We make strides in one and then make strides in the other. But as we've been talking about this, I wonder if it's more like a market and what's been happening is that the government has been operating in a competition-free market for privacy. You know, they have gone and done all this stuff without like the check of a competition and they've operated in secrecy without people talking about privacy. And now the bubble has exploded."

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According to a survey by Westlaw, the most common legislation being considered by states would require warrants before police can use drones -- though North Carolina, Utah and Virginia “called for the investigation of, or express concern for, the authorized use of drones against U.S. citizens by the U.S. government."

The Wall Street Journal reports on more of the findings:

Across the nation:

* 20 states have proposed or established privacy rights of action for those aggrieved by violations of drone rules;

* 17 have laws or bills banning “weaponized” drones;

* 17 have proposed or carved out emergency exceptions for drone use; and

* 16 have introduced or enacted laws making it a crime to violate drone statutes.

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"Revolution" is probably the most overused word in the chronicle of Internet history, but if anything, the Wall Street Journal undersold the real story. Hadoop's importance to how we live our lives today is hard to overstate. By making it economically feasible to extract meaning from the massive streams of data that increasingly define our online existence, Hadoop effectively enabled the surveillance state.

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Mounting domestic and international pressure against the PRISM surveillance program has forced the Obama administration to concede that the revelations have sparked “an appropriate debate.” Concern – and in some cases, outrage -- at these measures has been expressed by general members of the public and politicians, many of whom made no secret of their anger or mistrust toward them. Given the seriousness of the allegations, the outrage expressed at such a situation is obviously justified; the courage of the leaker and those taking the fight to government, commendable.

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The comment, viewed now, may vex the millions of Google users either surprised and outraged, or unsurprised but still outraged, at the news that through the NSA's PRISM program, the government has gained nearly boundless access to information about our Google-hosted communications. But this is about more than throwing up our smartphones and sighing, "We knew all along." Schmidt's 2009 comment expressed something at the very core of Google's ideology -- reduced to the company's corporate slogan -- "Don't Be Evil." With an ill-defined and ill-thought moralism at its foundation, the tech giant has been able to champion transparency and user privacy while at the same time marching in goose step with government and other industry players effectively establishing a totalized surveillance state.

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Much of the news of the past week has been about government access to phone and internet “metadata,” which is a part of communications that we almost never think about in the course of normal life.

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I asked one question: Do Americans really care? Specifically, I cited the recent Pew polling data suggesting a majority of Americans are willing to accept surveillance tradeoffs in exchange for protection against terrorism.

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Of the 4.9 million people with clearance to access "confidential and secret" government information, 1.1 million, or 21 percent, work for outside contractors, according to a report from Clapper's office. Of the 1.4 million who have the higher "top secret" access, 483,000, or 34 percent, work for contractors.

A number of writers like Shorrock have highlighted in the past week the vast government contracts and huge sums that play a formative part in expanding state surveillance. That point has been well made. What I want to stress here is simply that 500,000 employees is a lot of people -- a lot of people with a lot of access. A lot of people, unlike Snowden, who have chosen to march in step.

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Talk about your massive security clearance failures! If I were an NSA contractor, I might be predisposed to look askance at giving top-secret access to a libertarian-leaning employee who personally endorses anti-tracking tools and advocacy organizations that see surveillance -- by anyone, government or the private sector -- as a threat to civil liberties. Snowden might as well have had the words "information wants to be free" tattooed to his forehead.

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