The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
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. More.
The government argues that it needs the information as it prepares to once again defend the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act in a federal court in Pennsylvania. The law was struck down in 2004 because it was too broad and could prevent adults from accessing legal porn sites.
Big Brother
I’m so sick of this “government” I could scream. Forget Canada, I might just be willing to move to a third-world country at this rate. Convince me otherwise…
Do no evil?
It’s nice to see Google, after having caved repeatedly to capitalist demands to remove content, apparently taking a stand on this. But it also raises the question of just why Google needs to keep logs of every search query ever submitted with a paired IP address.
Or didn’t you know that? See the Wikipedia article for more. It doesn’t take a fringe advocate to say “Google amounts to a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Those newly-commissioned data-mining bureaucrats in Washington can only dream about the sort of slick efficiency that Google has already achieved.”
It reminds me of a very prophetic pre-PATRIOT Act post on Web4Lib by Thomas Dowling about scrubbing personally-identifying patron data.
Re:Do no evil?
I thought perhaps EPIC would have something posted on their site about this topic. It’s not there yet.
Backfire
This will backfire. As someone said in a comment about this at Huffignton’s news site, “I say let them, they will find the majority of hits -the most perverse-come from repressed, hypocrite prude Bush republicans. Porn again types.”
Re:Big Brother
I’m thinking about selling my place in Merida, Mexico. Keep an eye on http://mexintl.com/ for something yellow in the Frac. Montecarlo neighborhood.
Re:Do no evil?
Um, no one forces you to use Google and it is a business, a commercial enterprise, a profit making undertaking. If you give them your info and they use it to their advantage then you can’t complain. There has to be some quid pro quo.
If I want to search for dirty rabbit sex then I have no problem with them knowing the guy from 65.32.145.201 is looking for that.
On a related note Google is moving to have the subpoena quashed, a completely legal and acceptable move. That is they way things are done, not throwing fits because they were asked for info, but convincing the court that it is over-reaching, or overly broad, or not relevent or whatever reason they have for wanting to tell the investigators to sod off.
If the FBI wants to look through my HDD then come on over. I’ve nothing to hide. However if they dropped a subpoena on me as they did on Google I’d move to have it quashed too. No one has to provied information until a judge is convinced the information is essential to the action at hand. So far no judge has made that decision.
Re:Backfire
Huffington’s news site? My goodness that is a scream.
That is the site that reported that people in New Orleans were eating the dead after Katrina. Read it here.
I could have sworn Huffington’s site was a humor site.
In their own words
The Justice Dept subpoena to Google, and Google’s response are here:
http://news.com.com/2300-1028_3-6028780-1.html?tag =ne.gall.pg
Re:Big Brother
Oh yeah. Forget Canada. If you don’t like the present government in the States you would be just as unhappy with the govt. we are about to have inflicted on us in Canada.
Re:Big Brother
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Re:Big Brother
My opinion is more power to them! Since when do librarians have to defend the right for porn to be accessible to children? Enough said.
Re:Big Brother
It may start as porn but will move on to any search that Google indexes. Every step we take on the internet will be monitored if Google and other entities do not keep fighting this government requests.