Claire Cain Miller:

Americans say they are deeply concerned about privacy on the web and their cellphones. They say they do not trust Internet companies or the government to protect it. Yet they keep using the services and handing over their personal information.

Pew:

Across the board, there is a universal lack of confidence among adults in the security of everyday communications channels -- particularly when it comes to the use of online tools. Across six different methods of mediated communication, there is not one mode through which a majority of the American public feels "very secure" when sharing private information with another trusted person or organization.

Beverly Gage:

The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the Martin Luther King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau's capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated ... King's experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

Devlin Barrett:

The program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary in searching for suspects. Rather than asking a company for cell-tower information to help locate a suspect, which law enforcement has criticized as slow and inaccurate, the government can now get that information itself.

"What is done on U.S. soil is completely legal," said one person familiar with the program. "Whether it should be done is a separate question."

Nicholas Carr, in The Glass Cage:

"Resistance is futile," goes the glib Star Trek cliche beloved by techies. But that's the opposite of the truth. Resistance is never futile. If the source of our vitality is, as Emerson taught us, "the active soul," then our highest obligation is to resist any force, whether institutional or commercial or technological, that would enfeeble or enervate the soul.