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.
Of course. I remember that poor potato farmer who sold only to a local market, and they invoked the commerce clause saying that his 4-5 pecks of potatoes was affecting prices in other states -- and thusly was subject to the commerce clause.
Truly, we are living in Orwellian times.
As if you have a significant voting bloc. Dream on.
I think that court didn't realize what it was saying. Smut peddlers want to make a social change, to a society where pornography is fully accepted.
Fair enough. I'll keep dreaming for this:
....and you keep dreaming for this:
Yer a friggin' LAWYER??!?
Plato's Republic is widely considered history's very first written proposal of true communism (koinonia).
But I guess that makes sense: Statists often confuse communism with conservatism. So long as it increases government reach, they are all fer it.
This is not about kiddie porn.
It's about a law that attempted to keep regular porn (using consenting adults) out of the hands of minors on the Internet. Nobody can get this right. I saw the news this morning, and they even said it was about kiddie porn.
....and you keep dreaming of this:
Was that the same Fox story referenced on the latest thread? Either they're incompetent, or the leftists are right about them being cynical shills for Bush & Company.
Or they couldn't make the MS and AOL data fit their theory, and they're hoping they can make Google's data fit.
It's a puzzle how ANY data could fit the theory. What kind of dunderheads are masquerading as technical experts to that "court"?
That would explain it.
First, my post was a reply to a post which said, in essence, that if you are not a libertarian, then you are not logical. I then listed some very logical non-libertarians, including Plato.
As for Plato's Republic, most serious readers throughout history have understood the "proposed" regime in the Republic to be ironic ... i.e. it was not intended as an actual proposal, but as a thought experiment to reveal the LIMITS of politics by revealing the limits of the supposed "perfect" regime. I think that libertarians could learn a little bit about the limits of politics...not the limits of GOVERNMENT, mind you, but the limits of POLITICS and utopian political theories such as "libertarianism", which is, in many respects, just as utopian in origin as the theory of communism.
Perhaps a version of this proposal should be adopted:
The mental "expert" problem has grown to such massive proportions that it is simultaneously outrageous and ludicrous. To make that point, New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott proposed a legislative amendment addressing the state’s licensing guidelines for psychiatrists and psychologists earlier this year. "When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing," the bill read, "the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts.... [He] shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand [and] the bailiff shall dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong." While the state senate approved the amendment, it was rejected by the New Mexico House of Representatives in March, 1995.
There were numerous private cannons in use after the revolution. Congress granted letters of marque and reprisal to private warships ("privateers") to hunt our enemies, as authorized in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.
One commonly held belief about the Constitution is that no part is meant to be redundant -- all parts have meaning. The ability to grant letters of marque and reprisal is meaningless if private citizens do not themselves have the ability to effectively attack an enemy that is prepared to defend itself with weapons of war. Therefore, weapons of war were surely meant to be in the hands of the people.
*snrk*
There is a place for government, but that place should be relegated to the prevention of invasion and the interference of citizens causing other citizens DIRECT harm. The Founding Fathers set up an extremely wise and extremely limited government system, but modern leaders -- from Roosevelt to Truman to Clinton to Bush -- have completely perverted the concept to the point that I have actually had foreigners tell me they feel freer in their home countries than here.
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