minding your business
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc. has been subpoenaed by the U.S. Justice Department to turn over a database of search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography but Google rejected the demand as overreaching by the government.
In a Wednesday filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the Justice Department demanded that Google provide all queries entered on the company's Web search system between June 1 and July 31 of last year.
The Justice Department includes a request for Google to produce a random sample of one million Web addresses, known as URLs.
The data request is part of a broader government effort to track the effectiveness of a 1998 law, the Child Online Protection Act, or COPA, which penalizes Web site operators who allow children to view pornography, the filing said.
A 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Ashcroft vs ACLU, upheld an injunction that blocked the government from enforcing the law and the Justice Department is seeking evidence from Google and others as part of an appeal of this injunction.
The motion by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez vs. Google details the negotiations between the government and Google's lawyers, who have resisted the request as overreaching, burdensome and a violation of trade secrets.
"Google is not a party to this lawsuit and their demand for information overreaches," Nicole Wong, Google's associate general counsel, said in a statement. "We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously."
Comments
there are a few fishy things about this. first, they supposedly want one million random searches, not all of them. they also spposedly just want search terms and results, not the IP address that was searching (this is the part that might be used to identify people. they don't want that).
they say they're trying to find out what searches turn up porn, but they article i read also mentions child porn. they dont make the note tat a child looking at normal porn is not the same as child porn. this seems to be an important distinction.
also, what's to say they won't look for other trends in the search records, like searches for "impeach bush", or "miserable failure" (which through some clever linking, points to george w bush).
the most alarming thing is that yeahoo, microsoft, and aol were also asked for this information, and complies, although aol claims they didnt completely comply.
all in all, i don't like the idea of this...
Posted by: dave | January 23, 2006 11:04 PM