Google's transparency report [3] for the first six months of 2012 is out, revealing that the United States made almost 8,000 requests to hand over users' data. Of these claims, Google complied with 90%. In a post [4] on its Transparency Report blog, Google said that government surveillance is on the rise--sharply.

Turkey topped the censorship tree, with 501 requests to remove videos, posts written on Blogger, and one search result. Almost one-third of these were related to content regarding the man seen as the founder of modern-day Turkey, Kemal Ataturk. Content removal requests from the U.S rose by 46% compared to the previous six months.