Yeah baby she's hot!
Posted on 01/19/2006 10:36:33 AM PST by flashbunny
The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.
Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.
Privacy advocates have been increasingly scrutinizing Google's practices as the company expands its offerings to include e-mail, driving directions, photo-sharing, instant messaging and Web journals.
Although Google pledges to protect personal information, the company's privacy policy says it complies with legal and government requests. Google also has no stated guidelines on how long it keeps data, leading critics to warn that retention is potentially forever given cheap storage costs.
The government contends it needs the data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches as part of an effort to revive an Internet child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court on free-speech grounds.
The 1998 Child Online Protection Act would have required adults to use access codes or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, and it would have punished violators with fines up to $50,000 or jail time. The high court ruled that technology such as filtering software may better protect children.
The matter is now before a federal court in Pennsylvania, and the government wants the Google data to help argue that the law is more effective than software in protecting children from porn.
The Mountain View-based company told The San Jose Mercury News that it opposes releasing the information because it would violate the privacy rights of its users and would reveal company trade secrets.
Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's efforts "vigorously."
"Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching," Wong said.
Right. The founding fathers were so clairvoyant that they could foresee photography, film, and digital compression.
Hey, guess what; the words bolt-action rifle, lever-action rifle, pump-action rifle, semiautomatic rifle, heck, even breech-loading rifle, aren't in the second amendment either. I guess we have no constitutional right to keep and bear them then, do we? You'd better turn in your firearms there, mister conservative, you're breaking the law!
That will put the Libertarians in a panic.
Not to mention the Marquis de Sade, Aristophanes, or Martial (Philaenis the tribade predicates boys, and stiffer than a man in one day work eleven girls- what could be filthier than that?).
But let us for a moment assume the "The Founders Couldn't Have Even Imagined Porn" argument is correct. If they couldn't even have imagined it, how do we know whether or not they intended the first amendment to apply to it? If it's found that there are exceptions (other than libel, slander, yelling fire in a crowded theater, and divulging state secrets), Katie bar the door. Not only will the most vile filth be allowed and possibly promoted by the state, but those who oppose it will find there own right to freely argue against it (which is more effective than regulation anyway) curtailed in the name of Tolerance by hate-speech laws, as we have seen in Canada and Europe, where clergyman have been arrested for daring to stand up to militant sexual deviants.
If we do decide that internet porn is so awful it must be stopped, it will either be a laughably ineffective waste of money and resources, or it will result in a cure which is worse than the disease. What happens when some overseas spammer sends you a pornographic email that your filter doesn't catch? Will the porno-police kick in your door brandishing MP-5's and throwing concussion grenades, confiscating your computer and carting you off in irons? Will we send a Marine expeditionary force to Lagos and the other hubs of spam distribution to shut them down? Or will the laws be applied with the frivolity typical of government appendages, wielded as a cudgel by politicians against their political opponents or as a spectacle to distract from their own moral deficiencies?
The whole idea would be laughable were it not so dangerous. Ted Kennedy and the rest of that Parliament of Whores are to be the arbiters of morality, dictating what is wholesome or not to the benighted yokels, from their Sodom on the Hill? The idea is Monty-Python-esque in it's absurdity.
The only way morality can or should be regulated is locally. If a community wants to beat the smut which pervades it back into the brown paper bags and red-light districts where it belongs, they should have free reign to do so. Hopefully the incorporation doctrine preventing this will be modified or thrown out entirely. If people don't like it, they can debate it with their neighbors and attempt to change it, or they can vote with their feet. In any event, I would challenge anybody on this forum to make a convincing argument-- not some ambiguous screed involving junk science about porn addiction and generalized bumper-sticker platitudes-- that it's a good idea for the national government to involve itself in this matter, even if the interstate commerce clause and first amendment could be contorted to allow for it.
If I responded to every post where somebody cited a wrongly decided piece of judicial activism, I'd have no time to do anything else. Duh.
Yahoo rolled over for the government like a cheap whore.
I was wondering if the whole porn-parade might be a smokescreen for an Able Danger-type counter-terrorism undertaking, only on a much larger scale. Maybe I'm being over-optimistic. I can accept the constitution being stretched for wartime intelligence gathering and other national security concerns, but not for garden-variety criminality in which the Feds have no business in the first place.
You may want to contact your doctor and have him adjust your medication. You're clearly delusional.
The DOJ renegged on dumping NICs info. in spite of the Federal statute requiring them to. They sluff of the legal impediments involved in using the Echelon program to randomly monitor phone, internet and e-mail traffic. They're constantly pushing for "National IDs," national healthcare databases and biometric ID.
It all comes back to; would it be alright if they were compiling this on firearms related searches? Just to compile statistics of course. The fact that they could trace back to the searcher makes this a bad precedent.
The fact that what they are doing has no chance of determining whether even one search was done by a child makes it completely bogus. That inconsistency belies the very premise of this action as legitimate. It's not possible to accomplish what they claim to be doing. Therefore they aren't really doing this to protect children from seeing porn. That makes those defending them useful idiots.
The DOJ reneged on dumping NICs info. in spite of the Federal statute requiring them to. They sluff off the legal impediments involved in using the Echelon program to randomly monitor phone, internet and e-mail traffic. They're constantly pushing for "National IDs," national healthcare databases and biometric ID.
It all comes back to; would it be alright if they were compiling this on firearms related searches? Just to compile statistics of course. The fact that they could trace back to the searcher makes this a bad precedent.
The fact that what they are doing has no chance of determining whether even one search was done by a child makes it completely bogus. That inconsistency belies the very premise of this action as legitimate. It's not possible to accomplish what they claim to be doing. Therefore they aren't really doing this to protect children from seeing porn. That makes those defending them useful idiots.
Sorry for the double post. I've seen a lot of them lately. The system hiccuped and told me there was an error the first time so I backed up and hit the button again.
Great post!
GoogleCommieGaggle.
Purveyors of porn.
Yeah, ways have to be found to soak up all that extra revenue Congress has lying around.
Yeah, ways have to be found to soak up all that extra revenue Congress has lying around.
Yeah, ways have to be found to soak up all that extra revenue Congress has lying around.
As opposed to the courts you cite? One decision authored by FDR appointee Frank Murphy, and the other by William Brennan?
This is your standard for "conservative", is it? And then, despite scoffing at it loudly and vociferously, you apparently didn't bother to actually read the current guiding case on the issue of obscenity, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), because if you had, you'd have seen that it reaffirmed the Roth decision, and upheld the Roth definition of obscenity. Roth being the decision you like so very much, coming from noted conservative justice William Brennan as it does.
That's going to skew government data mining statistics.
Yeah baby she's hot!
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