The bad news is that the U.S. government is asking for more data than ever about Google users, and a growing number of other places are getting the same idea. This year, nine countries — including the Dominican Republic, Egypt and Indonesia — asked Google to hand over information for the first time. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that Google and other tech companies are publishing more details than ever before about government surveillance. On Monday, Google published a blog post summarizing some findings from the latest update to its Transparency Report on user info. Findings include: Demands for user information in U.S. criminal investigations in the first half of 2014 increased 19 percent compared to the last six months of 2013. The overall increase is 250 percent when compared to a six-month period in 2009, when Google first started tracking these stats.