Google rejects Bush demand
p2p news / p2pnet: Google has told the Dick Cheney /George Bush administration it won’t hand over search queries. But AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have provided data, "although one attorney involved in the case said Yahoo never turned over any personal information," says the San Jose Mercury News
US attorney general Alberto Gonzales asked a federal judge to order Google to comply with a White House subpoena, "as the administration attempt to restore online child protection laws recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court," says The Street.
And Google isn’t refusing the order, “on privacy grounds,” says The Mercury News. “But it clearly was concerned about public reaction.”
Kiddie Porn is a device often used by government elements and the corporate entertainment and software industries to ferret out information they might otherwise not be able to obtain, and/or to ease in controversial legislation.
"According to the online Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department originally subpoenaed Google in late August to provide all Web site addresses that could be located through Google’s search engine and submit a list of all search queries handled between June 1 and July 31," says The Street.
"The request was in connection with the department’s defense of the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 law. Government lawyers hope to use online activity data from search engines to measure the effectiveness of existing technologies, such as filtering software, compared with the protections in the 1998 law."
An alleged need for filtering software is also a major issue with the music and movie cartels as they seek to dominate p2p and sue people into buying product from them.
The DoJ’s request is worrisome, say privacy experts quoted by the Merucury News, "particularly in an era when the government has stepped up surveillance in efforts to combat terrorism — even admitting it has spied on Americans".
But Gonzales, "apparently never asked for any explicitly personal information," says the story.
According to him, data are needed to, “determine how often pornography shows up in online searches,” says the Mercury News. Gonzales had originally asked the four companies for “all URLs that are available to be located through a search query on your company’s search engine as of July 31, 2005″.
Also requested, “were records of ‘all queries’ entered between June 1 and July 31″. The subpoena said authorities didn’t want, “any ‘additional information . . . that would identify the person’ who typed in the query. The government later narrowed the scope of its request to a million URLs and search queries over a one-month period."
Privacy advocates, "long have suspected that search records would become a target of legal interest, as e-mails already are and music downloading histories have become," says the San Francisco Chronicle. "However, this is the first time privacy advocates remember that anyone has requested search data for a legal proceeding."
Most search engines tell users search histories will be turned over to law enforcement as required, it says, going on, "However, privacy advocates noted that few people actually read the policies and are therefore unaware that their queries could be scrutinized.
"David Holtzman, author of an upcoming book about privacy and onetime chief technology officer of Network Solutions, a domain name registry, recommended that search engines rethink how much user information they retain to avoid situations such as the one Google and others are in now.
"On the other hand, companies often boast of the data they collect, which they call particularly useful in providing customized search results for users and targeted advertising."
Also See:
San Jose Mercury News – Google sparks privacy fight, January 20, 2006
The Street – Google to Fight Fed Search Request , January 19, 2006
San Francisco Chronicle – Google says no to data request, Januaryy 20, 2006
January 20th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
remember typing in “miserable failure” in google?
http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
if google caves, bush might not be the number 1 miserable failure any longer.
January 22nd, 2006 at 1:27 am
Even though your link is broken, I copied and pasted it into my browser and saw what you meant.
NOW, go to:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/googlebombing-failure.html
Which is listed as “Why these results” at the right-hand side of your page and READ that….
Interesting, eh?
January 22nd, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Yes. very interesting the fact that so many websites link to George W. Bush’s bio with the description of “miserable failure” to skew Google’s results like that.
It’s also interesting to note that Jimmy Carter’s bio is the number 2 result.
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:14 pm
What does Google think they are above the law. Low Lifes! They should be doing everything they can to stop the proliferation of child porn sites. Google sucks.
And I’m not an anonymous coward. There was nowhere to list the source.
February 11th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
There is a simple solution that Google can make available quickly to resolve this problem: Let the users define the encryption keys that google desktop would use to encrypt the data like RSA and ultimately opensource the encryption API so that neutral third parties like PGP or else could implement open encryption libraries that would not be controlled by Google.
That way, Google would effectively be unable to access to the user’s content, making subpeanas from the government to access the data virtually meaningless…