After AllThingsD.com reported earlier today that Facebook had been in advanced discussions with the federal government to allow it to disclose requests under national security laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to the public, sources said that Google has appeared to be following its lead and is similarly engaged in talks to do the same.

This parallel effort would allow the Internet giants, as well as other digital companies, to disclose aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, as well as their scope.

This controversial issue has occupied Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. over the last week, after a series of news reports about the level of U.S. government scrutiny of telephonic and online communications of all kinds.

While sources noted that the discussions might not result in any action, it appears as if they are in advanced stages and could result in more robust disclosures being allowed if agreements can be made.

Pressure to take action has escalated ever since myriad allegations that top Silicon Valley Internet giants had given authorities unprecedented access to their huge stores of information via a National Security Agency program called PRISM. The companies, also including Microsoft and Yahoo, have denied that kind of “direct” access, but cannot escape the spotlight placed on how much information they are all compelled by the government to hand over legally.

That’s why all of them — facing consumer backlash and a big hit to their reputations — have called on the government to allow them to lift restrictions on reporting national security requests for information.

Google has been most vocal in calling for changes, while also taking to government officials behind the scenes, as Facebook had already been doing. The two companies, though, are not working together, and are having these discussions separately.

How much leverage the pair have together or apart is unclear. Collectively, they could threaten to sue the government to allow the disclosures, or be more publicly pugnacious about cooperation, as Twitter has done.

Instead, they are employing both public statements and private outreach to the Justice Department, the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goal is to be able to release more accurate information, typically via a “transparency report,” which discloses legal queries received.

But strict non-disclosure rules for the most important ones, from FISA, prevent the companies from telling users what is being given to the government.

Earlier this week, Google’s top lawyer David Drummond published an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller Tuesday asking to be able to publish information on such requests.

Drummond noted that the government should be able to “publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures — in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.”

He added: “Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.”

Maybe we will see soon enough, sources tell me, including the possibility that the numbers could be available within a few days.

In opening arguments this morning, DOJ attorney Lawrence Buterman presented a broad overview of the government’s case against Apple, offering up a bevy of email and phone record evidence that he claimed showed the company rallying publishers around a new electronic book business model that drove up the price of e-books just prior to the 2010 introduction of the iPad. “Apple’s conduct cannot be excused,” Buterman said. “Consumers in this country paid hundreds of millions of dollars more for e-books than they would have.”

Below, the full slideshow Buterman is using to argue the case:

U.S. v. Apple et al Opening Slides –

PREVIOUSLY:

• DOJ Misfires on Jobs Email in Apple E-Book Case — It Was a Discarded Draft
• Is Steve Jobs Message a Smoking Gun in Apple E-Book Case?
• Amazon Demanded Same Terms From Publishers For Which Apple is Now On Trial
• Apple Says Differences in Publisher Deals Belie E-Book Conspiracy Charges
• Apple Accuses DOJ of Unfairly Twisting Steve Jobs’s Words
• Apple Says DOJ Is Trying to “Reverse Engineer a Conspiracy” in E-Books Case
• Here’s the DOJ’s E-Book-Pricing Case Against Apple (Slide Deck)
• Apple CEO Tim Cook: “The E-Book Case to Me Is Bizarre”
• Judge in E-Book Pricing Case Thinks Apple’s Going Down; Apple Begs to Differ
• Here’s That Steve Jobs E-Book Email to James Murdoch
• Apple’s E-Book Argument: Deals With Publishers Improved Competition
• DOJ Filing Calls Apple “Ringmaster” of E-Book Pricing Rise
• Apple Alone Fighting DOJ E-Book Suit After Macmillan Settlement
• Apple’s Cook Must Testify in E-Book Antitrust Suit

The Justice Department will try to prove during the three-week trial in Manhattan that the publishers seized on Apple’s entrance into the e-book market as an opportunity to shift from low prices set by Amazon.com to higher ones set by the publishers themselves.

“Stripped of the glitz surrounding e-books and Apple, this is an unremarkable and obvious price-fixing case,” Justice Department lawyers said in a May 14 court filing.

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Jeremy Hammond and other members of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacker group Anonymous, stole credit-card information and other confidential data from the firm, Strategic Forecasting Inc., prosecutors said.

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In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

1. As AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka were first to report this week, Yahoo is seriously thinking about buying hipster blogging service Tumblr. In fact, Yahoo’s board is scheduled to consider a $1.1 billion all-cash deal on Sunday.
2. Google wanted to dominate the headlines this week during the company’s annual I/O conference … just maybe not like this. By sending Microsoft a cease-and-desist, they helped promote that rival’s anti-Google campaign.
3. That little drama didn’t come up during the official proceedings of I/O, but a lot else did. Here’s a rundown of all the news Google announced in its three-and-a-half-hour opening keynote.
4. Watch this: An interview with Bill Gates, in which the Microsoft founder talks about his longtime relationship with Steve Jobs, on “60 Minutes.”
5. Can productivity apps for the iPad make it as useful as a traditional work PC? Walt Mossberg puts them to the test.
6. Speaking of the iPad, the Justice Department is closing in on Apple with an e-book price fixing case … but one of the seemingly most damning pieces of evidence, a line from a letter from Steve Jobs to James Murdoch, is a little less damning in context.
7. Web video services like Amazon, HBO and Hulu all say they’re seeing significant growth. But is anyone cutting into Netflix’s lead? A new report says: Nope!
8. BlackBerry is bringing its messenger application, BBM, to iPhones and Android phones this summer. But is it too late?
9. Cisco’s earnings only barely beat analysts’ expectations this week, but that beat sent the company’s stock up 9 percent in after-hours trading. Arik Hesseldahl got CEO John Chambers on the phone to talk about where Cisco is and where it’s going.
10. And lastly, if you want more battery life out of your iPhone on the go, you may have considered a special re-juicing case. Product reviewer Lauren Goode tries the battery boosters before you buy.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

Lawyers from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining kickback allegations made by a former Microsoft representative in China, as well as the company’s relationship with certain resellers and consultants in Romania and Italy, these people said.

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In an open letter posted on his book publishing company’s website Wednesday afternoon, Macmillan Chief Executive John Sargent said the firm is still committed to fighting the antitrust case brought by the Justice Department involving allegations that Macmillan and four other publishers plus Apple Inc. conspired to raise e-book prices.

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“There’s a possibility of competitive harm here,” said Joseph Wayland, who served as the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief until last week, when he stepped down to return to private practice. Mr. Wayland said officials are devoting “huge energy, particularly at a senior level” to this and other antitrust issues surrounding patents.

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According to the DOJ complaint, the agreement began no later than 2006 and lasted at least until 2009. The DOJ said the agreement for over a year also barred at least eBay from hiring any Intuit employees at all. EBay and Intuit directly compete for employees, including specialized computer engineers and scientists covered by the agreements at issue in the case, the department noted.

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The department also granted clearance to a contingent deal in which Verizon agreed to sell spectrum to T-Mobile USA.

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To clinch their deal with Verizon Wireless, the cable companies have agreed to limit the scope and duration of side agreements to sell each other’s services, the people said. Consumer groups and other critics had said the joint marketing pacts were effectively agreements between the companies not to compete for customers seeking broadband Internet, television and phone services in their homes.

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Under the terms, PokerStars, based in the Isle of Man, will pay $547 million to the Justice Department and $184 million to poker players overseas owed money by it and rival website, Full Tilt Poker. As part of the arrangement, Pokerstars will acquire the assets of Full Tilt.

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Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said. Investigators have also questioned Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and other cable companies about issues such as setting data caps, limits to the amount of data a subscriber can download each month, these people said.

Representatives of all those companies and the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.

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With those words, senior Apple executive Eddy Cue stuck to his take-it-or-leave-it business model of a 30 percent revenue share payable for transactions through the iTunes service. Despite my arguments to Mr. Cue in Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., offices last year on behalf of news publishers seeking different terms, to him there was no difference between a newspaper and an online game.

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Without mentioning Apple Inc. or the five publishers that are the target of the investigation, Sharis Pozen says she won’t hesitate to act against “collusive behavior at the highest levels of companies.”

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Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.

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However, antitrust enforcers in the U.S. and Europe remain concerned about Google’s commitment to license key Motorola patents to competitors on fair terms, those people said, and are likely to closely monitor Google’s use of the patents. The European Commission has set a deadline of Monday to decide whether to approve the acquisition.

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“We’ve built the system and had it on a shelf waiting for more legal certainty,” said Gordon Medenica, the director of the New York lottery, which is planning to start selling lottery tickets on the Internet next year. “We’re pleased for the opportunity this gives us.”

A number of statehouses and lotteries in search of new revenue have recently considered proposals to allow some form of online gambling. Washington, D.C., voted this year to allow its lottery to operate online poker, but the law hasn’t yet been implemented. Five state lotteries already offer modest Internet-based subscriptions for lottery drawings. Both Illinois and New York have drawn up more expansive plans to sell tickets online to their lottery drawings.

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In a nutshell, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel has determined that the Federal Wire Act, the 1961 law that had been interpreted to outlaw all forms of gambling across state lines, actually only applies to “a sporting event or contest.”

Well, what does this mean? It means that Internet poker isn’t barred by any federal statute.

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The two companies on Monday filed a joint motion to stay their pending federal court case until at least January. The move clearly wasn’t AT&T’s idea, however. The Justice Department said last week it would seek a stay in the case given that AT&T had pulled its paperwork with the Federal Communications Commission.

“If approved by the court, all pretrial and trial deadlines, including depositions and discovery, would be cancelled and a status conference would be held before the court on Jan. 18,” the Justice Department said in a statement. The government said that under the joint plan, AT&T will file a status report with the court by noon on Jan. 12 indicating “whether they intend to proceed with the transaction at issue in the litigation, whether they intend to proceed with another transaction, the status of related proceedings with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and their plans and timetable for seeking any necessary approval from the FCC.”

In a statement on Monday, AT&T said it is working with T-Mobile on “whether and how” to proceed with the deal.

“AT&T is committed to working with Deutsche Telekom to find a solution that is in the best interests of our respective customers, shareholders and employees,” the company said. “We are actively considering whether and how to revise our current transaction to achieve the necessary regulatory approvals so that we can deliver the capacity enhancements and improved customer service that can only be derived from combining our two companies’ wireless assets.”

Until now, AT&T has plowed full steam ahead with the proposed $39 billion deal, despite objections from a long list of competitors and regulators, including the FCC, DOJ, Sprint and C Spire Wireless (formerly known as Cellular South).

At a congressional hearing, Sharis Pozen, the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief, said: “We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general.”

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The decision to release the analysis — which came despite AT&T’s objections — marked the latest blow to the deal, which is on life support after a lawsuit by the Justice Department and criticism from the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC said last week it wanted to call a trial-like hearing to review the deal. AT&T responded by pulling its application at the FCC and the agency, after some discussion over the weekend, agreed Tuesday to let the withdrawal go through.

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The plan, according to the New York Times: Sell off some of T-Mobile’s assets (customers and spectrum) to Leap Wireless International.

Such a move would make Leap Wireless the fourth-largest carrier in the nation, while allowing AT&T to keep only those T-Mobile assets it really needs. But will it win AT&T the regulatory approval it needs to proceed? Seems unlikely. Transforming Leap into the nation’s No. 4 carrier doesn’t do much to preserve competition in a market in which AT&T and Verizon hold a clear duopoly.

But at this point, AT&T is evidently willing to try anything, even risking a $39 billion merger on a deal with a company that does around $700 million in revenue per quarter. And given the circumstances, who wouldn’t be making last-ditch efforts? If the deal fails to garner regulatory approval, AT&T will owe T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom $3 billion in cash and $1 billion worth of spectrum.