Facebook and Microsoft have published some aggregate data about US government surveillance, while Google is pushing to be able to give more information.

Getting information on 19,000 or 31,000 accounts in these companies with millions of users does not amount to general surveillance. But I do not trust Facebook, Microsoft or the NSA to tell the whole truth, even if they are not lying. (Clapper perjured himself on this very question just months ago.)

Even if those figures are the true answers to a question, there may be some sort of trickery in the question. For instance, these numbers might count only orders that demand something beyond "metadata", while some other general surveillance scheme collects metadata about all users.

Unless we can get to the bottom of things, we don't know what if anything this means.

US citizens: ask your congresscritter to make sure the farm bill protects the wetlands in which northern pintail ducks (and lots of other less visible species) live.

US citizens: sign this petition calling for an end to Obama's "signature strikes".

That doesn't go far enough; drones should not be used to attack outside of battle zones. But it is still good to sign.

There is some evidence that BPA makes pubescent girls fat.

On the implications of killer robots and bee drones.

If the developer of the bee drones really believes their main use will be to find people in collapsed buildings, he is a fool. They could be made to kill, perhaps with a poison needle. But even if all they do is take pictures, the NSA could operate hundreds of billions of them to watch everything everyone says and does. We'd have to sweep our rooms frequently for faux bugs.