Google And The Govt.
So, when the Justice Department wanted to know what people were searching for, Yahoo, AOL and MSN turned over their records, Boing Boing's Xeni reports. Google didn't, and that is why it's in the news for challenging the government.
The G-men and women don't want any names, they say. They just want to know what key words people type into search engines to help the War on Porn. Some urls would be helpful, too.
Google's refusal prompted the Justice Department to go to court Wednesday and ask a judge to compel the company to comply.
From the San Jose Mercury News:
The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.
Lots of blogosphere response.
At Business2.0 Erick Schonfeld writes:
The issue here is whether Google or any other public search engine that records our clickstreams can be used by the government to spy on the online activities of American citizens carte blanche. It's almost as if, having failed with its Total Information Awareness initiative of a few years ago, the government is now trying to turn Google and the other search engines into a giant surveillance database to use any way it wishes.
At Reason Online, a commenter named Stretch makes some sense:
I'm not sure how effective this would be in actually determining how often people are exposed to pornography. I mean, you can type any word into google and eventually down the list porn sites will start cropping up. But nobody ever gets that far down the list. Does anyone even go to the third page, let alone the 103rd?
ha. on a personal basis, i could care less, but if google says it will give away trade secrets, then they shouldn't unless they are guaranteed that it will be in the strictest of confidence. unless the government will use this knowledge to program its own, pornographically safe search engine. i can't imagine my latest personal searches leading to porn, but i haven't gone down to page 103 "linux", "dilirious" (checking the spelling), "lian li" (a computer case maker), "StrConv" (looking up what a VB function does [i don't use vb]), "WebRequest .NET using X.509 certificates" (obvious), "sum of divisors" (math research)... there's also one for "Albert Einstein". Google has safe search filtering too http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en But, anyone explicitly looking for porn will make sure this is off.
"Google's refusal prompted the Justice Department to go to court Wednesday and ask a judge to compel the company to comply." I hope Google wins this one. It is an abuse of subpeona powers to use one to gather statistical information from an unwilling party where there is no underlying allegation or indication of wrongdoing either by the company or its customers. What's next - the government subpeonaing medical records to see if people are overweight and have high blood pressure?
I so don't understand any of this. "The G-men and women don't want any names, they say. They just want to know what key words people type into search engines to help the War on Porn. Some urls would be helpful, too." Is the gov't short on computers? Is the FBI not connected to the internet? Could they not sit down in front of their own computers and type in keywords to see what they get? This is that hard to figure out? They can hire an 18-25 year old male or two and find out more about porn on the internet than they'll ever get out of subpoening records. For crying out loud, they could ask Howard Stern to run it as a contest - $500 to the person who comes up with the most porn url's. WTF? And what does this have to do with anything? "The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches." How do they connect "how often" with "who's doing it"? The whole thing is bizarre.
This whole thing is being echoed in a scary way all over the place. Data harvesting, Bush's domestic spying, dirty political tricks. It's the sort of thing paranoid people were warning about in the 60's and now seems to be happening in fact.