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.
In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.
Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government’s effort “vigorously.”
“Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,” Wong said.
At some point, someone has to put their foot down. Every day it seems it is something else, there is some other bogeyman out there that requires us to cede more ground to the authorities. During the eighties and early nineties (if I remember correctly), it was crack and drugs in general, and this was used as the reason for rewriting how the government approaches searches and property seizures (see US v. Ross, Maryland v. Wilson, and Wyoming v. Houghton for representative examples- and this is just the tip of the iceberg and does not even begin to cover the full extent of the changes over the past few decades, to include the property seizures that go on every day).
Then came terrorism, which seems to have replaced the War on Drugs as the ultimate opportunity for power grabs by the government. After Oklahoma City, Clinton gave Congress the wish list every prosecutor and federal agency had wanted for years. Thankfully, much of that was rejected by a Republican-led congress who rightly did not trust government with that much power. After 9/11, though, all bets were off, and you know where we are now.
It is important to not forget that child pornography has always been another avenue that the authorities use to tug at our emotional centers to get us to give them more power. Don’t forget the horrible CDA, which thankfully was struck down. No one likes the idea that child porn happens and that there are predators on the internet. But enough is enough, damn it, and thank goodness for google. This as good a fight to pick as any, and I intend to support them.
*** Update ***
More here from Radley Balko.
Brian
From what I read, the subpoena isn’t really about child porn anyway. It’s about sites that make porn accessible to kids, which would translate into almost everyone if you count the image search function on google, as anyone who has searched for innocuous words like “mom”, “cat” and “tattoo” can verify.
I’d call this a rather vast overreach here, something along the lines of demanding information from, say, AOL for every user’s activity since some people may be accessing illegal download sites through them. It’s a fishing expediation in the worst sense.
Ancient Purple
What a disgrace. First our Attorney General decides that his top priority in office is not fighting terrorist in America or graft and corruption in Washington. No, his top priority is “obscenity.”
Now, to further that mission, he is going after Google.
Whew! Glad we got that terrorism knockdown completed and Washington is squeaky clean.
Nikki
Writing kinda fast at the end, were you?
Shouldn’t this be the other way around?
John Cole
Nikki- Thanks.
Tunch was standing behind me meowing for whatever reason, and as I got to the end of the piece, his meowing took on that shrill tone, so I was rushing.
What did he want? Was he starving? In pain? Bleeding?
Nope. Just wanted my attention RIGHT F–KING NOW, and when I went to pet him he ran off into another room.
Damn cat.
slide
the government wants ALL GOOGLE SEARCHES. ALL SEARCHES. Wow. And this is for what again? Oh.. child pornography. RIGHT! Wake up america, Big Brother is reading your mail, listening to your phone calls, checking EVERY purchase you make, spying on Quakers, compiling databases left and right and now they want to know what you are searching for on Google.
Do we want the Central government to have this kind of information on every one of us? Foget wheter or not you trust Bush, he is not going to be president forever, do you want President Hillary Clinton to know what you were searching for on Google? your master card purchases, what you said to your aunt in Europe? Is this the type of FREEDOM we are killing thousands of Iraqis to impose?
Wake up America.
Give me Liberty or give me death.
Steve
This is a limited program.
Pb
To me, the scariest line in that article was this: “The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.” I’m glad I use Google, but I wonder if I should start using google.ca instead (You wanna search, eh?)…
slide
– eavesdropping on “thousands” of communications of Americans without a warrant
– labeling Americans “enemy combatants” and putting them in jail without judicial review
– Military spying on Americans engaged in political activity
– database of all commercial transactions of American citizens
– checking library records on American citizens without a warrant
– paying right wing “commentators” to spew the government line.
– millions and millions spent on “propaganda” in Iraq which blows-back to American media
– government producing fake newscasts and sending them to media outlets which run them without saying they are from the government
– cherry picking of intelligence to misrepresent the reasons for war
– affilliated groups attacking the military records of those that oppose government policies (McCain, Cleland, Kerry, Murtha, etc)
– authorizing torture
– authorizing rendetion
Wake up America. We are losing our country to a bunch of criminal thugs. This path we are on if unchecked is the path to fascism. An overstatement? Sorry to say no. Think it can’t happen here? Think again.
GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH
slide
Use another search engine? Write to them and ask them if they have given any records to the Federal government without a warrant. Lets publish a list of the scumbags.
Al Maviva
Um, big brother may be reading your email, but BigCorpCo. is retaining copies of it in the first place, to slice it, dice it, and sell it to the highest bidder. It’s all good and well to get upset when the feds collect this information, and as bad as the feds can be, I have more trust in the feds – even under a Clinton or Kerry WH than I have in the People’s Republic of Safeway, the Democratic Free State of WalMart, and Amazonia.
I’ll hit the bell again here, since nobody heard it ring last time. Every place that you shop using a “club card” or an electronic payment, your shopping is tracked. Data agregators take this data, compile it into reports, and make it available for a fee. I get targeted mailings that advertise age-appropriate toys and clothes for my child. WTF? Whose business is it to do that? I get targeted mailings for credit, for new cars, motorcycles, bicycles, whatever, from companies I’ve never had anything to do with.
And the damnedest thing about it, is that if there is something in error in the agregated reports, there is no way to get it fixed. While this is irrelevant to mass market mailings, it matters because employers are increasingly coming to rely on this agregated data. The agregators, for their part, point out that they don’t own the information, equifax, or your bank, or safeway, or Mom&PopCo. own the information, so the agregators can’t correct it. Think about that – that last job you applied for but didn’t get, you may have “lost” because of incorrect credit or lifestyle information reported by some agregator you’ve never heard of.
So while we piss and moan about the Fed’s methods of looking for terrorists and kiddie p40n, which *could*, remotely, just possibly, mistakenly sweep any of us up, the real intrusion on your privacy that is actually occurring and which is actually likely to cause real injury to you, goes unnoticed. And just as a side benefit, you think the agregators have any objection to selling your info to the government, or anybody else? Corporatism is just as dangerous as BigGov, only in different ways, and perhaps in more insidious ways because as Hayek pointed out, central government is terribly inefficient, but a free market that can spontaneously organize and re-organize itself tends to be fairly efficient at accomplishing whatever the market actors seek to do. When the goal is to produce an all-source data picture of you from hundreds of transactions you’ve been involved in over the years…
So yeah, I’m bummed the government wants to look at my Google searches. I’m even more bummed that Google has hung onto them, and is looking at them, and maybe selling or doing God-only-knows what else with them.
What’s the fix? Privacy and commerce data protection legislation governing private sector and quasi public actors, probably. What’s the likelihood? Nil, as long as other relatively minor privacy concerns flood the radar. It’s simply not a legislative priority because it’s not on the radar, and frankly, a lot of big corporations on the data buy & selling side probably pay a lot of money to keep it off the radar; and there may even be a valid economic argument to do so involving the stimulation of the economy. But still. I don’t know the liberal take on this. I do know that the little “c” conservative movement needs to remember that corporations are often just as much the enemy of preserving the good old things, as the subset of “progressives” who fail to examine the consequences of everywhere and always opposing the status quo, no matter what that might be.
D. Mason
I guess it was un-avoidable, they had already declared a war on porn, and disregarded privacy protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights… It was only a matter of time before the thought police put the two together and started invading peoples homes (via their ISP) to wage war on peoples sex lives. This kind of thing was a foregone conclusion before Bush II ever put his hand on the Bible. Some of us knew they would use porn as a pretext for cracking down on the internet way back in 1999 when they were still talking about hanging chads. Now the rumblings have started. These are the kinds of things they have to do to keep bringing the Jesus jumpers out to the polls.
I dislike child porn as much as the next guy, but this won’t end (or probably even begin) with child porn. Just like this crooked administration has used the threat of terrorism as and exscuse to go after dissenting Americans, they will use the threat of child porn as an exscuse to go after Americans who enjoy pornography. Then their assault on the internet will be in full swing, they can freely monitor our emails and instant messaging for “communications with alkayda” and they can monitor our surfing to “protect the children”. Hell, if this is anything like the war on terror, their will be a sharp upswing in child pornography because of their efforts, won’t that be nice.
I guess they will be having “surgical strikes” on Ron Jeremy before we know it.
These guys call themselves conservatives but I don’t see anything conservative about spending truckloads of tax dollars to tell people how to think. Infact, that flies in the face of conservatism as I know it. This administration has set back the conservative movement decades in the eyes of the public. As a true conservative it breaks my heart that thanks to bush we have the biggest government ever, all in the name of conservatism. If you consider yourself conservative and you voted for bush, you should be ashamed.
slide
Al Maviva as usual just doesn’t get it. Yes, Al, I am unhappy with the violation of my privacy by Corporate America. But do you not see the difference in the GOVERNMENT knowing everything about you? Do you not see the potential for abuse? Now of course they say they need this information for our own good, right? To fight the scourge of terrorism or to get at those nasty child pornographers. Does any totalitarian governement ever say anything other than they are doing what they do in the best interest of their citizens? Its just remarkable that people like you go along with it.
Checks and balances. The founders were very very wise when writing the Constitution. They did not rely on trust. They did not rely on “good intentions”. They understood the corrupting influence of power and how it could be abused. They put in checks and balances so that there would be an inablitly by any one part of government to accumulate enough power to overwhelm those safeguards. They understood that without those checks and balances any democracy could degenerate into tyranny. They were proven right by the rise of Nazi Germany.
No Al, the government having all this information on US Citizens, including what they may be researching on Google, is very very dangerous. The fact that you and others of your ilk don’t see that makes it all the more troubling.
Cyrus
You seem to have a habit of reading too much into comments. Al is “bummed”, in his words, by what the government is doing, but he’s “even more bummed” by the fact that Google and similar corporations are doing the same thing. You, on the other hand, are “unhappy” about Google, but think the government is “very very dangerous”. Is it just possible that what we have here is a difference of opinion about the relative risk and importance of two events, rather than you bravely denouncing a crypto-fascist?
The Heretik
Surgical strikes on Ron Jeremy? Thanks for that laugh. And thanks, John for the legal case links. Linked you at Squeeze Play Update
D. Mason
Lol it’s cute how you guys are fighting over who you would rather be spying on you, big government or big industry. The same bankers who own the corporations also own the government.
The Other Steve
Just to give you an idea of how fucking stupid Republicans are… ICANN was going to establish an .xxx TLD so that the internet would have a designated red light district. Republicans blocked it, saying it would promote porn… as if the status quo doesn’t already have porn.
Worst Tech Moments of 2005
The Other Steve
Not that you needed any other proof that the Republican Party is composed of the Stupidest people on Earth.
Pb
slide,
What makes you think that you’d get back any more than a non-denial denial from a corporation. I guess if you’re lucky, you might get an outright ‘no’, but what are the odds of that.
Al Maviva,
Google doesn’t have a standing army. However, I do agree with some of your concerns about private corporations devoted to data mining that selling what they learn, especially once it intersects with government. I’m sure you can find numerous examples of this if you look around a little.
slide
Obviously we have a difference of opinion about which is more potentially dangerous – government collecting information on me or corporations collecting information on me. For the record, I dont’ like either, but the government has the power of putting me behind bars, private corporations dont’. And since the government can declare anyone an “enemy combatant” without judicial review, that is something to be concerned about. Now… before I get jumped on, I am not saying that is what is happening now but one must safeguard against the possibility of an unscrupulous President using the information gathered to consolodiate power and eliminate political opposition. So, yes, big difference in risk in my estimation between government and private corporations gathering information.
MAX HATS
You can’t raise moral outrage — and with it, votes — over a problem you already fixed.
That’s why, for instance, Roe will never be overturned. Doing so would be political suicide, in a backhanded way.
Barry
Comment – Google, and most corporations don’t have standing armies. But they can frequently rent one, and the government can happily purchase their product. That product is manufactured with far fewer checks and balances than the government works uner.
Barry
D Mason: “These guys call themselves conservatives but I don’t see anything conservative about spending truckloads of tax dollars to tell people how to think. Infact, that flies in the face of conservatism as I know it.”
Then you really don’t understand conservatism. Censorship for reasons of morals has been around for quite a long time,
and was pretty prevalent in this country until (at a guess) the 1970’s.
It was revived during the Reagan administration (see: ‘Meese Commission’), and it’s no surprise that the Bush II administration would do the same.
BC
Thanks Gonzalez.
This will peel off another 1% of Republican support. It might surprise the Bush administration, but some of the “base” doesn’t like Big government peering in their windows.
skip
The good John, the libertarian John, awakes from a long stupor (mundi).
Al Maviva
Gee Slide, I can write you a macro so you can type with a single keystroke, “Al, in spite of agreeing with much of my argument, is completely wrong, as usual…”
And yes, I’m aware that data agregators sell data to the government; and suspect that if you prohibited the government from doing this kind of datamining, that they’d merely buy a much smaller set of information pre-sorted and pre-analyzed by the private sector. Allowing a distinction between private/public here will merely shift the analysis & data mining function into the private sector. If Amazon can predict your tendencies and Safeway can too, then the government has the technical capability of doing it, and if they are forbidden from doing so they are likely to just let some security contractor or some data agregator do the work, and you can try to stop them but that only works until they figure out some technical or legalistic work around. And as the private sector collects more and more data, and figures out ever better ways of mining it, I don’t know how you can really keep the government from dipping into it. “Here’s 25 people we believe traffic in Kiddie Pr*n, Mr. AG, and BTW we think we can similarly identify identity thieves, potential terrorists, or drug kingpins.” That’s a tough sell for an attorney general to turn down, no matter what party he belongs to, and that’s why I think the government poses a threat here, but the private sector’s truly vast collection infrastructure, which really does cover the whole economy, is a larger long term threat. It is the honeypot that this administration, or the democratic one that comes after it, will find tough to ignore. Data mining of this sort is probably going to get done one way or the other, my gamble would be to impose stronger privacy protections on both the private and public sector and push for much greater oversight, along with allowing private civil remedies. Yep, that’s pretty fascistic of me…
Pb
Al Maviva,
I’m with you on this one, then. And–as I’m sure you know–that’s entirely not fascistic of you, but rather the opposite. (seeing as how economic fascism is essentially corporatism, and we are opposing that…) It may not be technically libertarian either (or, nowadays, a mainstream Democratic or Republican position), but I think it is vital.
stickler
You had a chance to do just that, in fall 2004. If you voted for Bush, then you voted for this policy. There was no evidence — none — to indicate that the secrecy-obsessed, incompetent, and spendthrift Bush policies of 2001-2004 would change after re-election. And guess what? They didn’t change.
And, Al, you might want to remember that one political party is more likely to do something about regulating corporate behavior. Hint: it isn’t the Bush-led GOP.
Pooh
For the second time today, I (heart) Al Maviva.
Seriously, the ‘electronic privacy’ ship has long since sailed. The issue isn’t neccesarily the capability (which is neither good, nor bad, it simply is), but rather whether appropriate constraints are on the use of said capability are in place.
Eural
I’d like to jump in on this discussion with you guys but I’m afraid that the government will tap these records without my knowledge (or with any legal authority) in order to use my criticisms against me. With that possibility a potential I will now commit myself to a policy of self-censorship and self repression before the Great Leader (whomever he or she may be) has to do it for me. Its whats best for me and our great country. Oh, yeah – 2+2 = 5.
Steve
I took a close look at the subpoena and Google’s response. My sense is that as long as Google continues to resist the pressure to comply with the U.S. Government simply because of who they are, they have by far the better of the argument.
The government is basically saying to Google, “Access to part of your database would help us illustrate a point in this lawsuit that doesn’t involve you, so turn it over.” I don’t see that argument flying. A litigant doesn’t have a right to access a business’ proprietary information simply because it helps them illustrate a point. The specific information requested actually has to be relevant.
The real concern I have is with these other search engines who have apparently turned over their data voluntarily. Google is making a strong, market-savvy pitch that they will fight like dogs to protect the privacy of people like you and me. Their competitors apparently want to send the opposite message.