Google: Government Internet Surveillance On the Rise

Official requests for user data are up 67 percent from last year

Here's an item unlikely to surprise anyone who has followed how David Petraeus was brought down by a Gmail account: Google is getting more government requests for user data than ever before.

For the first half of this year, Google received 20,938 official requests for user data from governments around the world, affecting 34,614 accounts. That's up 67 percent from the second half of 2009, the first period in which Google reported the information publicly.