Huge DoJ ’search’ effort
p2p news / p2pnet: The Bush admnistration’s Department of Justice efforts to mine Internet search queries were very much wider than suspected or known.
Google attracted a lot of badly needed favourable PR when it refused to hand data after Microsoft and Yahoo had readily complied.
But it wasn’t alone in raising objections.
"Responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by InformationWeek, the Department of Justice disclosed that it has issued subpoenas to a broad range of companies,”" says InformationWeek.
"Asked which companies objected to, or sought to limit, these subpoenas, Department of Justice spokesperson Charles Miller declined to comment, citing that the litigation was ongoing. He also declined to comment on the utility of the information gathered by the government.”
Documents seen by InformationWeek reveal, “some companies did object to the government’s demands. In an E-mail sent to the Department of Justice last July, Fernando Laguarda, an attorney representing Cablevision Systems Corp., characterized some of what the government was asking for as ‘overly broad, vague, ambitious, and unduly burdensome’."
The subpoenas were issued between June and September, 2005, to AOL, MSN, Google, Yahoo and LookSmart but, it was likely, "the government’s interest in LookSmart stems not from the company’s search engine, but from its ownership of Internet content filtering software company Net Nanny," says the story.
Companies subpoenaed included: 711Net (Mayberry USA), American Family Online, AOL, AT&T, Authentium, BellSouth, Cablevision, Charter Communications, Comcast Cable Company, Computer Associates, ContentWatch, Cox Communications, EarthLink, Google, Internet4Families, LookSmart, McAfee, MSN, Qwest, RuleSpace, S4F (Advance Internet Management), SafeBrowse, SBC Communications, Secure Computing Corp., Security Software Systems, SoftForYou, Solid Oak Software, SurfControl, Symantec, Time Warner, Tucows (Mayberry USA), United Online, Verizon, and Yahoo.
"The subpoenas directed at security software companies asked for a substantial amount of information, including any and all documents that fall into 29 separate categories, including the kinds of content filtering products or services offered, the number of customers using those products or services, how users configure their filters, how filters get updated, R&D spending on such products, the methodology used to generate blacklisted or filtered sites, and pretty much any data gathered that relates to the use of filters," adds InformationWeek.
Also See:
InformationWeek – Justice Department Subpoenas Reach Far Beyond Google, March 29, 2006
April 3rd, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Civil what?
April 3rd, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Shite, the DOJ would have it’s fingers in EVERY BIT OF DATA THAT COULD BE COLLECTED AND STORED if they thought they could. Even if all that data were to totally overwhelm their ability to use it that’s what they are after.
April 4th, 2006 at 12:27 am
Seems a conclusion that they are not interested in kiddie porn but that the filtering system and the intellectual methodology is the real target for acquisition.