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[Commentary] Digital storage and computing speeds are such that it is within the technical capacity of the government to archive every telephone conversation on earth. I have at my fingertips, thanks to my Gmail account, every e-mail I have written since 2005, nearly 26,000 separate conversations — and if Edward Snowden’s accusations about the NSA’s Prism program are accurate, so does the National Security Agency (though there’s a lot we don’t know about what steps the government has to go through to exploit the technology). The Google servers alone contain vast quantities of information, instantly searchable, belonging to their many millions of customers, like me. In proving Moore’s Law, all the world’s information can be stored, cataloged and accessed in ways that would make J. Edgar Hoover leap with delight.

One of the big questions raised after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s secret surveillance programs is how a private contractor working at Booz Allen Hamilton had access to such sensitive information in the first place.

We still don’t know the precise answer, though here’s a bit of broader context: Top-secret clearances for outside contractors aren’t necessarily unusual. In fact, roughly 500,000 private contractors had security clearance to handle top-secret material in 2012. But there’s an important caveat here: Clearance doesn’t mean all these workers get to see every classified document out there. And, as various analysts have pointed out, Snowden likely would have needed even higher clearance than “top secret” to gain access to PRISM and other surveillance programs. (One former NSA official told the Post that “maybe 30 or maybe 40″ people would have access to the secret court orders that Snowden leaked.)

[Commentary] Ever since Edward Snowden leaked a couple of top-secret documents about government phone and Internet data-gathering, Google has pushed back. It is not a participant, willing or no, in a broad data dragnet, the company insisted. No one at the National Security Agency (NSA) has any kind of direct or open-ended access to its servers. It was “very surprised,” in fact, to learn that the NSA is apparently collecting the “metadata” of every phone call placed within, to or from the United States. The Obama Administration should allow Google and other tech firms to say a little more about their relationship with the government. But the transparency should not stop there. The revelation that so surprised Google — that the NSA is collecting all that phone metadata — apparently relies on a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a provision that allows the government to obtain business records relevant to national security investigations. We don’t see why the program itself had to be a secret, and we don’t see why the legal rationale for it shouldn’t be released, as well.

Lawmakers who want access to classified information have to ask for it. But that doesn’t mean they’ll get it.

While government contractors such as NSA leaker Edward Snowden and others with high-level security clearances can view classified government secrets, members of Congress face a much tougher burden: consent from their peers. Some members of Congress are grumbling that the Obama Administration left them in the dark about the existence of far-reaching spy programs. But House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) defended the process. “If members of Congress wanted a briefing — obviously all members of Congress have secret clearances … they could get it,” he said. A top member on the House Intelligence Committee suggested this week that it’s easy for his colleagues to see classified documents.