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Government computing resources, like any other government procurement, used to be purchased by agencies for those agencies... and nobody else. It didn't make sense to share, because the very concept of sharing compute power didn't even exist. Now in an almost unprecedented shift of philosophy, the U.S. Government is one of the world's leading adopters of private cloud infrastructure. In order to slash costs fast, it's moving to the cloud sooner than almost anyone else.

Now, some government agencies, departments, bureaus, and divisions that no longer have any reason to avoid maintaining their compute resources separately from one another, also have no viable reason for staying separate from one another. IDC analyst Shawn P. McCarthy has discovered, and discusses in a newly published report, local governments are rapidly slashing costs by purchasing compute power and capacity on a metered basis from state governments.

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is delaying Tuesday's scheduled Senate vote on the controversial Protect IP Act.

The move, as well as a similar delay on a vote of a companion bill before the House of Representatives, appears to be the clearest indication yet that Wednesday's Wikipedia blackout and Web protest swayed lawmakers. On Thursday, several lawmakers dropped their support of the controversial measure and all four Republican presidential candidates took stands against it.

Egyptians go to the polls today to vote in the first election since the ouster of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Egypt was a flashpoint in the so-called Arab Spring this year, a string of popular uprisings in which the Web and mobile technology played crucial and unprecedented roles. Google is celebrating this historic event with an election-day doodle on its Egypt's Google homepage.

Google has also launched an extensive Egyptian elections page full of info on candidates, major issues and polling stations. The information is provided by Egypt's Higher Elections Committee, but Google's page enhances the content with Google News, Maps and its other election tools. Google is building tools and programs to improve elections around the world, and this landmark election in Egypt is a storybook example of Web technology as a force for open and accountable government.

In a show of good faith today, Google touted the fact that it has refused to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. who requested the removal of YouTube videos of police brutality and criticisms of law enforcement officials. Google cited its transparency report from the first half of this year, but to mention it today is telling. With violent crackdowns at Occupy Oakland this week, citizen media like YouTube have been a vital channel. From Google's mid-year transparency report:

"We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove. Separately, we received requests from a different local law enforcement agency for removal of videos allegedly defaming law enforcement officials. We did not comply with those requests, which we have categorized in this Report as defamation requests."

Google has updated its Government Requests tool with data from the first half of this year. For the first time, the report discloses the number of users or accounts specified, not just the number of requests. Google also made the raw data behind government requests available to the public.

Google launched its interactive transparency report last year. U.S. requests for google user data have spiked in the past six months, and Google complies 93% of the time. Google's transparency efforts have displeased some governments, but its compliance with requests have upset some civilians, too. In this increasingly weird new world, Google can only err on the side of more transparency while pushing for better laws.

This may seem as Clintonian as it possibly gets, but the answer to whether the U.S. Government is concerned about the possible dangers of transitioning its information services to the cloud, truly depends on your definition of the word "the."

Many government agencies including the Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) have already started the process of transitioning their services to cloud-based deployment models, under what it calls a "Cloud First" policy for assessing any new technologies it procures. But these are private clouds - essentially, pooled hardware resources that create a platform for virtualized environments. They may still be closed off, although certain services that deal with non-sensitive information - especially public-facing Web sites - do borrow resources from public cloud providers.

US Senate lawmakers will introduce a bill next Thursday that would fine big companies that lose consumer data in a security breach due to poor security measures.

The Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act, sponsored by Democrat Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, would enable the Justice Department to fine businesses with more than 10,000 customers $5,000 per violation per day, with a maximum of $20 million per violation, according to The Hill.

Last Friday, Amazon took on the U.S. Post Office and opened a real world locker box service as a delivery portal for the stuff people buy on Amazon.com.

The lockers, which come in several sizes, are located on a wall in a 7-11 convenience store in Seattle surrounding an ATM-like device that allows a customer to key in a PIN and pick up their Amazon package.

Despite a significant outtage of Amazon Web Services earlier this month, Amazon recently announced the launch of a new zone, AWS GovCloud. While cost savings are a definite plus in this economy, downtime and security issues caused us to wonder if the cloud could be trusted with such vital data? So, we asked you for your thoughts on trusting the cloud for government use.

You answered and we culled your responses on Facebook and Twitter and used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

It wasn't long after the last week's Amazon Web Services outage was resolved that the cloud hosting services provider had some big news. A new zone, called AWS GovCloud, was launched for the explicit purpose of giving U.S. government agencies and contractors a secure, cloud-based environment for sensitive data and applications.

While this month's AWS outage wasn't nearly as long or severe as the one we saw in April, such disturbances are a potential cause for concern. If you think having Reddit or Tumblr go down for an hour can cause a panic, imagine having mission-critical systems at the Pentagon grind to a halt.