“The deal was big news across the web. Amazon, pundits said, had stepped up its effort to challenge old-school giants like IBM in an area the old guard had long dominated federal contracting. The chorus of voices swelled Friday when the General Accounting Office responded to IBM’s protest with a ruling that said the CIA chose Amazon over Big Blue due to a “superior technical solution.” But Amazon’s CIA contract is important for far bigger reasons, and marks a much bigger shift than most people realize. You see, the GAO ruling on the matter reveals that the contract involves Amazon building cloud services inside CIA data centers. “The contractor generally was to provide a copy of its existing public cloud (modified where necessary) to be installed on government premises,” the GAO ruling explains. That may seem like a small thing, but in the world of cloud computing, it’s a seismic event.”

“There’s no denying it, the numbers speak for themselves. Five million people — that’s one in every 50 American adults — have clearance,” Goitein said. “It’s very pervasive. Over-classification results in over-clearance, essentially: Too many people needing clearance for jobs that are relatively low-level and non-sensitive in nature.”

“In its press release, Facebook reported that from June to December of 2012, the government made between 9,000 and 10,000 requests involving user data, and these requests were connected to between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts — clearly a small percentage of the 1 billion active users on the network. The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook complied “at least partially” with 79 percent of the requests in that time.”

“It would be odd [for the NSA] to focus entirely on telephony logs and exclude Internet traffic,” said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., who focuses on electronic surveillance topics. “I would assume they’re vacuuming up IP logs and perhaps e-mail headers as well.”

“The big insight here is that younger adults are not indifferent to privacy, as many seem to believe.”

“The Court disagrees with the Government,” the decision reads, “that FISC Rule 62 prohibits the disclosure of the copies of the FISC opinion to EFF under FOIA.”

“Now we live in a very different technological era. For many people, cell phones are the primary, if not exclusive, means of communication; the Internet has exploded into something that can now be accessed by a device that can fit in the palm of your hand; and we are slowly moving into an era when it will be commonplace for people to store personal data in “the cloud,” where Fourth Amendment protections don’t necessarily apply. To the extent that they have been able to deal with the issues that this new technology presents, courts have been forced to apply precedent based on twentieth, or nineteenth, century technology to the twenty-first century. The result, quite often, has been a decided bias in favor of the state and against individual liberty. At the same time, Congress has generally failed in its task of honestly debating new laws that apply to these technologies, and has acceded to the requests of law enforcement for greater powers to gather information. The classic example of this is the Patriot Act, which passed Congress with little actual debate by overwhelming margins in both the House and the Senate –a mere six weeks after the September 11 attacks. Since then, the law has been renewed with largely inconsequential revisions several times with little notice by the public.”

“In World War II, the mentality of the public was that our whole way of life was at risk, we’re all in. We censored the mail. When you wrote a letter overseas, it got censored. When a letter was written back from the battlefield to home, they looked at what was in the letter to make sure they were not tipping off the enemy,” Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Capitol Hill. “If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don’t think it is.”