Another governmental overreach of power. (MSN/Yahoo/AOL comply, Google says "F***off"
 

Jan. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, was sued by the Justice Department after it refused to turn over information that may help the government monitor sexually explicit material on the Web.

A motion to compel compliance with a subpoena, filed yesterday in federal court in San Jose, California, said the government seeks the data to enforce the Child Online Protection Act, designed to protect minors from pornography. A challenge to the law is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Justice Department said it asked for all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses in the company's database. According to the lawsuit, other search engines have complied with similar requests, ``and have not reported that they encountered any difficulty or burden in doing so.''

``We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously.'' Nicole Wong, a Google lawyer, said in a statement. Wong said the demand for information ``over-reaches.''

The information would ``assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering software in screening that material,'' the government's filing said.

Yahoo

Mary Osako, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo! Inc., said the company complied with the government inquiry on a ``limited basis,'' and didn't give the U.S. ``any personally identifiable information.''

``We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy,'' Osako said. ``We did not provide any personal information in response to the Department of Justice's subpoena. In our opinion this is not a privacy issue.''

Ask Jeeves, an Internet search engine owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp, has not received any requests from the government, spokesman Patrick Crisp said.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit.

ACLU Challenge

The American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy rights organizations successfully sued to block enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act after it was signed into law in 1998, according government's lawsuit. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case after a federal appeals court twice upheld challenges to the Act on grounds it violates First Amendment free speech protections, the lawsuit said.

Google objected to the government's subpoena, saying it would reveal trade secrets by providing the data and disclose personally identifiable information about its users. In response, the government said it would keep the data secret and that the request wasn't for personal information.

Shares of Google fell $8.46, or 1.9 percent, to $436.45 in Nasdaq Stock Market composite trading. They've risen 5.2 percent this year.

The case is Gonzales v. Google Inc., 5:06-mc-80006, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Jose).

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=arCWSKEPoJaE

Nice to see the Conservatives only believe that the free market is doing what it's supposed to do when it's something that the Conservatives want them to do.

We are becoming a smaller world, true, but government (be it either side of the spectrum) is trying to become a bigger part of my data.

I wish the other three companies had grown a set of balls, and did what Google did.. There is NO reason why they need this information, except to justify another "Take away freedoms FOR THE CHILDREN" Law that is blatantly unconstitutional.

I know I over use the statement.. but Benjamin Franklin said it best: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security"

I think the ACLU goes too far the other way, but goddman, I hope they find away to rip the government a new asshole on this one.

Great, now I have to watch what I type into search engines so that I don't get flagged. And if you think this is just for kiddie porn, you are extremely naive.

Almost every government invasion of privacy starts with the "to protect the children" slogan attached. Strangely, people continue to fall for it.

People are dumb. People are so damn narrow minded.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight....

SI

(grins) not one supporter of this so far here? :D

Personal stake SirFozzie? Perhaps your Google search record is a little spotty?

How long did it take you to figure this out? ;)

google is smart too, this should help their stock value continue to soar through the freaking roof.

This reminds me to switch my searches from Yahoo! to Google.

whose isn't? :D

Google has it's own things though, there are combinations of words that will not come up with results on a search. Such as: President/mourning/Iraq.

Huh? I got 1.2M hits from that. Is this some sort of Google bombing thing you're talking about?

SI

Interesting. I just tried it again and got 131 hits only, most of which talk about the automated program that give some of the combinations that can't be accessed.

Try it without the slashes you silly guy. ;)

Edited to add that I understand the situation. The White House website has code included that doesn't allow indexing searches to index the /president/mourning/iraq directory.

That was my only point. I was surprised to learn that there was such a program in place, but upon reflection I'm not sure why considering the NSA operations....

This sort of thing is necessary. I wanted to find this posting, so google'd "things written online by SirFozzie", and you should have seen the filth that came up.

Did you find his letter about the night he was working in the pantyhose factory?

Unfortunately, there's another SirFozzie.

I first found out about him a year ago when I was looking to see where my stuff (from a couple sites) had gotten copied (without permission)

I nearly changed my username on the whole intraweb cuz of him.


Ewww (shudder)

Actually, it's been getting absolutely hammered recently, and is way down today (like 8%).

The Google response has nothing to do with privacy. They are only worried about themselves. The Government is not asking for any personal data. They are only looking for some raw data to show trends on the web. The Internet Child Protection Law may need to be tweaked some, but it is a reasonable idea. While I believe parents should police their children and a free interent can be a great thing, some reasonable protections won't hurt anything.

Are they paying Google for this data? If it isn't a criminal case, the government should have to compensate Google for the expense of compliance and have agreements that none of the data becomes part of the public record. Especially if they feel that compliance may be expensive and/or harm them in the marketplace.

Yeah,no kidding.

The problem is that although they don't reveal who typed in what information, lots of searches are very personal - names and such. As a paid internet author of some popularity on my site who occasionaly writes for other sites, I'm sure my name gets googled occasionally. Why should the government know how many times my own name is googled? That's not revealing who did the searches, but it still reveals sensative information.


-Anxiety

Why is that so odd? They don't want you to be able to access directory structure. Any webpage worth its damn doesn't even allow web directory indexing, almost always on the ground that it's ugly as sin not because it has sensitive info.

SI

You assume one has any kind of clue as to what the hell directory structure is or would do. What I see as an utter technological moron is a global search engine with a White House program that prevents certain combinations, and yes, I find that odd.