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.
Good day to you.
Well, I misunderstood the exact details when I first wrote, and then corrected it.
But I have no problem with the government trying to stop both child pornography AND access by children to pornography. That used to be taken for granted in the days before naked bodies were displayed on the shelves of the checkout counters.
I agree that there are right and wrong ways to do this, and that it is particularly difficult to control the internet, since it was built to resist any kind of centralized control or interference. But I don't think we need totally uncontrolled pornography all over the place, either. It wouldn't break my heart of they prosecute a few pornographers for selling to minors.
Trying to stop children from accessing porn is good.
Supoenaing private companies to give up private information and technological secrets in order to show something that they easily could have shown for themselves by doing monthly samplings of search results themselves and archiving the results is quite another.
Further this would set the precedent at an extremely low bar to find out what people are searching for. It could easily empower an incumbant to supponea who is searching for information on an opposition candidate.
Edited to remove distractions and possibly clear the smoke.
Yeah, it seems like kids can't check out Cartoon Network or Disney sites without running into ads for Big Ed's Animal Farm. /sarc
Try taking responsibility for what your children watch; don't expect the nanny-state to sanitize the world for your precious.
"Commerce" can be also be interpreted as exchange of ideas.
I would argue that federal regulation is a bad idea whether it's constitutional or not (see post #343).
af_vet_rr revealed in this post that the government has already done that.
Cicero: But I don't think we need totally uncontrolled pornography all over the place, either. It wouldn't break my heart of they prosecute a few pornographers for selling to minors.
That is fine. As long as they do it Constitutionally I'm all for it.
The problem with the actions cited in the article is it won't work. The gummint claims to want search records from Google in order to determine how much porn was accessed by minors. There is no way they can know (from the records they are subpoenaing) whether even one minor has viewed porn on the net.
Isn't there something wrong with that picture?
Because the federal government simply defines it as affecting commerce, and therefore commerce.
I confess I don't visit porn sites. The stuff pollutes your mind, and the images are impossible to get out. It reduces other people to things, and corrupts the imagination.
I agree with you that it's good to be suspicious of government spying on citizens. I suppose the proof of the pudding is in the eating. It depends what they do with it, if anything. Cops sit by the side of the road and give tickets to speeders. They paint every car that goes by with radar. That's OK, as long as they take the trouble to arrest the real speeders, and not just the most convenient people who slightly exceed the limit.
They will have data on millions of people, and they can only use a little of it. If they use it to fine pornographers for selling to minors, that's fine with me. If they use it against web trickery that redirects surfers to porn sites, that's also fine with me. If they start yanking in citizens for visiting porn sites, that will only get them into hot water, and rightly so.
I guess some degree of spying is inevitable, and the internet is not inherently private. So, let's hope they pick the right people to make examples of. Not like the music moguls, who are going after kids and grandmothers and all sorts of people with huge and unjust penalties for music downloading which they may not even know about.
They stated what they wanted to do with it in the subpoena and it is in the article.
They will have data on millions of people, and they can only use a little of it.
They will have data on no people just searches. They say they intend to use it all to compile statistics. Why believe that is all they will do with it?
If they use it to fine pornographers for selling to minors, that's fine with me.
They made no claim to be doing that.
If they use it against web trickery that redirects surfers to porn sites, that's also fine with me.
They didn't claim to be doing that either.
What they did claim to be doing is impossible with the data they are seeking. Isn't there something wrong with that picture?
I have a strong suspicion that you are an AOL user.
I enjoy Mojave's posts. Most of the statists on FR are dumbasses, but at least Mojave's smart, despite my disagreeing with 75% of his views. That said, I still thik he's an AOL kid. Or maybe WebTV.
LOL
I guess his presence kept the thread alive for about a hundred posts.
Have they invoked the search engine/client privilege yet?
I thought an exchange of ideas was intercourse.
Yea. Unfortunately.
> You cannot tell me with a straight face that you believe that the founders would have approved and sanctioned the unfettered access by adults of the most vile forms of pornography found today.
You sure don't know much about Benjamin Franklin.
Thanks for the link, see you over there!
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