What Google and NSA Snoops Have in Common

[Commentary] Verizon Business, a subsidiary of the giant telecoms operator Verizon, has been ordered to supply the National Security Agency with call records of all its customers for three months ending on July 19. It's a good bet that this isn't the first such order, and that other telcos are supplying the same information. This is less surprising that it should be. The world's biggest internet companies got rich doing exactly the same thing.

Like the security apparatus, they too are eager to gather every last speck of information about you. One group does it to target better ads and build more omniscient products. The other does it in the interests of national security. Internet activists are rightly concerned by the consolidation of power in the world's largest internet companies. But they seem lilliputian compared to gigantic volumes of data quietly being accumulated by governments. To call it Orwellian would be a cliché; it is just plain terrifying.