As revealed by agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is hungry for information on the Internet. Under programs like PRISM, it taps Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo to look at the communications of a literally unknowable number of their users. (It's classified.)

It's inherently hard to talk about how the NSA gets this information because it obtains classified orders for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is administered by a secret court. Anyone who gets a FISA order is legally obliged to keep mum about it.

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Bush was speaking with CNN in an interview from Zambia, and said that there "needs to be a balance" between privacy and security, "and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."

Bush was asked about the NSA's phone and Internet surveillance program specifically, and replied: "I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed."

He also commented on Edward Snowden, who first leaked information on the program to the press. "I think he damaged the security of the country," Bush said.

Watch:

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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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VENICE — Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s six-part “S.A.C.R.E.D.” (2011–2013) is a stark installation that sits beneath a round, heavenly fresco by the late Baroque artist Sebastiano Ricci, surrounded by the works of other Italian Old Masters, including a fresco by Alessandro Vittoria, an altarpiece by Renaissance artist Lazzaro Bastiani, and a chapel with works by Mannerist painter Palma il Giovane.

Entering from the street, you walk into a typical Venetian church interior, but in place of pews you see six oversized iron boxes that at first resemble a Minimalist installation. Upon further inspection, you discover windows and “skylights” that allow you to peer into six scenes from the artist’s 81-day incarceration in 2011.

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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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Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges "have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information 'inadvertently' collected from domestic US communications without a warrant," Glenn Greenwald and James Ball reported, publishing two leaked documents, which detail the procedures the intelligence agency must follow to target individuals.

Via the Guardian:

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When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency.

Mr. Kelly’s move to the spy agency, which has not previously been reported, underscores the increasingly deep connections between Silicon Valley and the agency and the degree to which they are now in the same business. Both hunt for ways to collect, analyze and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans.

... Despite the companies’ assertions that they cooperate with the agency only when legally compelled, current and former industry officials say the companies sometimes secretly put together teams of in-house experts to find ways to cooperate more completely with the N.S.A. and to make their customers’ information more accessible to the agency. The companies do so, the officials say, because they want to control the process themselves. They are also under subtle but powerful pressure from the N.S.A. to make access easier.

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The law's interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.

Here Benjamin restates one of the fundamental goals of classical liberal political philosophy, at least for philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke, namely to eliminate the use of violence from everyone except the state and its duly appointed deputies. This is why in Locke, the state "agrees" to protect the rights of individuals in exchange for individuals giving up their right of retribution and punishment. The right of violence becomes the sole provenance of the state, whether through the death penalty, prisons or defense of the state itself.

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When Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, gave a presentation at the Gel 2013 conference in April, he couldn't have foreseen the bombshell news revelations about the vast extent to which the government was surveilling and hoarding communications data. What he did make clear, though, was just how prevalent the collection of such data was already by tech giants like Google; the ability to pass on such personally identifiable data is intrinsic to Google's financial model. Weinberg pointed out that these online giants are designed in such a way as to track you (that's how they monetize through targeted advertising) -- but this has led to an increasing demand, via court orders, from law enforcement and government agencies for this already tracked online data.

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Blaze explains that, given the scale of data collection, the government has amassed what could be called "a National Relationship Database." He writes:

Metadata is our context. And that can reveal far more about us — both individually and as groups — than the words we speak.

Context yields insights into who we are and the implicit, hidden relationships between us. A complete set of all the calling records for an entire country is therefore a record not just of how the phone is used, but, coupled with powerful software, of our importance to each other, our interests, values, and the various roles we play.

The better understood the patterns of a particular group’s behavior, the more useful it is. This makes using metadata to identify lone-wolf Al Qaeda sympathizers (a tiny minority about whose social behavior relatively little is known) a lot harder than, say, rooting out Tea Partiers or Wall Street Occupiers, let alone the people with whom we share our beds.

It is, in effect, a National Relationship Database.

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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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So far, the select intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., has already delivered a series of mini-panegyrics to the NSA's PRISM and phone metadata hoarding programs, and to Alexander himself.

Via the Guardian:

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“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret,” Kelly said on Monday. The commissioner didn't criticize the surveillance programs themselves, just the secrecy surrounding them:

I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone, it’s going to be recorded and it goes to the government... I think the public can understand that. I see no reason why that program was placed in the secret category.

Kelly -- who again and again has rejected greater oversight for his department -- suggested too that the NSA may need more oversight. Azi Paybarah of Capital New York noted the irony in his morning brief:

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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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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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Let's also say that you simply accept at face value the Government's unverified assertion that it has halted "systemic" illegal/unconstitutional surveillance by the National Security Administration. And let's say that you still believe such an assertion even though a few years after it was aired 1) the Director of National Intelligence admitted illegal surveillance was still taking place and 2) Mother Jones reports that an 86-page court ruling "determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying."

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"As everybody who's been associated with the program's said, if we had had this before 9/11, when there were two terrorists in San Diego, two hijackers, had been able to use that program, that capability, against that target, we might well have been able to prevent 9/11,"  Cheney said. He continued with a pointed criticism of President Obama. "I find a lot of it is, in other areas — the IRS, Benghazi — not credible. I'm obviously not a fan of the incumbent president."

Asked about Edward Snowden, who leaked information about the NSA program to the press, Cheney called him a "traitor."

"I think it's one of the worst occasions, in my memory, of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States," he said.

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