Feds Seek Google Records in Porn Probe

AP Via Yahoo ^ | 2006-01-19

[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.

[x5452]

Actually they're looking for any pornography, not specific types.

Th Child Protection Act which they are trying to legitimize deals with stopping children from accessing porn not being present in it.

Basically they are looking to violate the whole concept of privacy to see whether some 12 year old found a link to some xxx site while searching for the hot coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto.

[dcwusmc]

The CONSTITUTION for the United States says it's not the job of government, The Tenth Amendment says that if a power is NOT SPECIFIED to FedGov, then it is DENIED to FedGov. Can you show me (or anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together) just exactly WHERE this sort of authority is granted to FedGov?

[af_vet_rr]

I'd like to believe the government won't keep or use this weeks worth of "random" Google searches for anything other than the stated reason, ie. "statistics on porn related searches." I'd like to but I don't.

I'd like to believe it as well, but the fact that they are going after "all" speaks volumes - even if the searches are divorced from identifying user information (i.e. IPs), if they can find enough searches that they are not happy with (and I'm sure the data would be shared with other agencies and other levels of government), then you will really see what they are wanting to do with this. Don't be surprised if they decide they want IPs of various searches.

Here is a good roundup of the major issues revolving around this - one of the key points brought up by the author is this: I said above that a more accurate way for the government to assess how often children might encounter porn through search engines would be to conduct their own research. Indeed, they have. Government Report Says MSN Search Adult Filter Most Effective from the SEW Blog back in June covers this report that the US Government Accountability Office did back in June. From what I can see, it measured how often children might encounter porn through image search. To do the assessment, no subpoenas were required. Note that to do this, they said:

We performed unfiltered 5-minute searches for six keywords: three keywords known to be associated with pornography and three innocuous terms that juveniles would likely use (a popular teenage singer/actress, a popular cartoon, and a popular movie character).

They managed to do this assessment (the US Government Accounting Office) without issuing a subpoena to anyone. Moreover, it has stats they say they want already produced and ready to go. Page 48 and 67 have details. The caveat is that this seems to have been a test of image search results (Yahoo was 92 percent non porn, MSN 76 percent, Google 64%). But you could do the same thing to measure web search.
------------------

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.

I don't mean to burst your bubble, but we have a National ID. President Bush and Ashcroft and others wanted a National ID, and they have it. It's tagged onto Drivers' Licenses, but it's real (or rather "REAL").

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.

Too many FReepers seem to ignore this - they seem to think that Republicans will control the White House and Congress forever. They give an automatic free pass to anything this adminstration does - it doesn't matter if the administration is creating the tools that liberals can and will use against us.

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.

Amen to that.

[willyboyishere]

The Bush Administration should leave Google AND the Internet ALONE---if they press this one, there will be
hell to pay from a sizable percentage of their "base", which is eroding much like the New Orleans coastline.

[steve-b]

Yep. People who are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on issues like warrantless wiretaps are going to desert him now that it's become evident that, no, Virginia, they don't want to restrict their snooping to The Bad Guys.

[Mojave]

they don't want to restrict their snooping to The Bad Guys.

Libertarians and other the various other breeds of anarchists don't consider child pornographers to be bad guys.

[steve-b]

So, you're the... fourth, is it?... who didn't read the original article.

[af_vet_rr]

Libertarians and other the various other breeds of anarchists don't consider child pornographers to be bad guys.

LOL, you should really read the article before posting.

[Mojave]

I was commenting on your post.

[Redcloak]

But that spoils all the fun!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Maybe, this is more of a legal chess move than an actual expectation that they'll get Google to cough up anything. Then when the inevitable court challenge comes about the new law, when asked "why didn't you check with Google" the goobermint can say "we did, they refused, the courts wouldn't permit us to get it by force."

[HiTech RedNeck]

READ OUR LIPS. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT GOOGLE.

[Pro-Bush]

No need to google. I have my porn sites memorized and/or bookmarked.

[Mojave]

READ OUR LIPS. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT GOOGLE.

"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."

Google isn't at risk, the kiddie porn industry is.

[Mojave]

LOL, you should really read the article before posting.

You should take your own advice.

[HiTech RedNeck]

So? You will lose big on 4th Amendment. Your jackbooted myrmidons have no legal right to Google's data. None, zip, zilch. I look forward to your falling on your face in front of the Supreme Court.

[Mojave]

You will lose big on 4th Amendment.

Beg that question! It's your specialty!

[UnbelievingScumOnTheOtherSide]

Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...

So where did it go wrong? It started with:

1868 FOREIGN LAW: "From 1879 until the early 1930s, American courts followed the Hicklin test, which was taken from an 1868 English case, Regina v. Hicklin 3 Queens Bench 360, 362 (1868)"
http://www.cas.okstate.edu/jb/faculty/senat/jb3163/obscenity.html

Not to be outdone...
1873 CONGRESS PASSES THE COMSTOCK ACT (STILL IN FORCE): The Comstock Law was a 19th century United States law that made it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" books through the mail. It was passed on March 3, 1873 and is a clear example of censorship. It was named after its chief proponent, the anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock. The enthusiastic enforcement of the Act, often by Comstock himself, made American censorship notorious in Europe. George Bernard Shaw, who had his own works censored in the United States, coined the word "comstockery" to describe censorship without regard for culture or merit. (Wikipedia)

1957 ROTH V UNITED STATES: "Roth was a chaotic fringe figure in publishing. Sometimes he published works of literary value, like Joyce's Ulysses, and sometimes he published admitted pornographic works, indiscriminately. He mailed flyers to a mailing list of millions of people, including minors; the postal service prosecuted him as much for the unwelcome sexual junk mail as for the contents of the books and magazines he shipped through the mails. He was convicted of obscenity in New York State and the Supreme Court accepted an appeal on the sole issue of whethr the postal obscenity law was unconstitutional. (Roth was precluded from arguing that the law, though constitutional, had been incorrectly applied to him.)

Roger Fisher of the Justice Department--later a Harvard professor and authority on negotiation--was charged with arguing the case in favor of the obscenity law. He resorted to a time dishonored tactic: he carried a box of obscene materials into court, all of which had nothing to do with Roth, and offered them to the justices as samples of the pollution that would flood the U.S. mails if the postal obscenity law were invalidated. By doing so, he violated (and encouraged the Court to disregard) the tradition that the Supreme Court, an appeals court, does not look at evidence (especially evidence that was not introduced--and could not have been introduced, because irrelevant--at Roth's trial).

By bringing his box of pornography to Court, Fisher declared himself the spiritual descendant of Anthony Comstock, the 19th century anti-vice crusader who lobbied Congress with a sack of pornography, and the spiritual ancestor of Senator James Exon, who waved his "Blue Book" of pornography in the Senate last June to win passage of his Communications Decency Act (the "CDA").

Fisher won his case--the postal law stood-- and (here's the punchline) when the Supreme Court sent back his box, half the stuff in it was missing."
http://www.spectacle.org/1195/pornintro.html

"NO LAW MEANS NO LAW" SUPREME COURT JUSTICE HUGO BLACK

BEWARE THE BLOODY FLAG!

[HiTech RedNeck]

No "begging" but a flat, accurate statement. Not even Scalia will let you take Google's data.

[Mojave]

Beg on.