[Updated Below]
Oh man. If
this doesn't wake up the so-called "Libertarian" faction of the right wing, they're gonna be rudely surprised when they awake from their Rip Van Winkle slumber...
Feds want Google search records
BUSH LAWYERS ASK JUDGE TO MAKE GOOGLE HAND OVER DATA; GOOGLE PROMISES A FIGHT
By Howard Mintz
Mercury News
The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google Inc. to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases.
More on the flip...
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 inaccessible to minors.
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 one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period.
The Mountain View-based search engine 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.''
This could be a big deal. I wonder how many repressed fundy porn surfers are going to appreciate this level of scrutiny?
Read the rest at the link.
Edit: I should have included this bit...
The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.
The best update I've seen today is from
ZDnet. Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have caved.
Federal prosecutors preparing to defend a controversial Internet pornography law in court have asked Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online to hand over millions of search records--a request that Google is adamantly denying.[...]
An attorney for the ACLU said Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL received identical subpoenas and chose to comply with them rather than fight the request in court.
Yahoo acknowledged on Thursday that it complied with the Justice Department's request but said no personally identifiable information was handed over. "We are vigorous defenders of our users' privacy," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako. "We did not provide any personal information in response to the Justice Department's subpoena. In our opinion this is not a privacy issue."
Osako declined to provide details, but court documents in the Google case show that the government has been demanding "the text of each search string entered" by users over a time period of between one week and two months, plus a listing of Web sites taken from the search engine's index.
"Our understanding is that MSN and AOL have complied with the government's request, that Yahoo has provided some information in response, but that information wasn't completely satisfactory (according to) the government," ACLU staff attorney Aden Fine said.
Representatives at AOL and Microsoft said on Thursday that they were investigating the matter.
A Microsoft representative said: "MSN works closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested....It is our policy to respond to legal requests in a very responsive and timely manner, in full compliance with applicable law." [...]
A subpoena dated August 2005 (click here for PDF) requests a complete list of all Internet addresses that can "be located" through Google's popular search engine, and "all queries that have been entered" over a two-month period beginning on June 1, 2005. Later, prosecutors offered to narrow the request to random samples of indexed sites and search strings. It's unclear what version of the request AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo complied with.
Although the government is not asking for Internet addresses that would identify people, some legal experts fear that disclosing search terms would invade privacy.
"The more (the government) can figure out who the surfers are, the more people's First Amendment rights are in jeopardy," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University.
The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday. But in court papers, it says that even though other search companies voluntarily complied, excerpts from Google's logs are "of value to the government" because it has the "largest share of the Web search market." [...]
In a letter dated Oct. 10, 2005, Google lawyer Ashok Ramani objected to the Justice Department's request on the grounds that it could disclose trade secrets and was "overbroad, unduly burdensome, vague and intended to harass." [...]
A trial before U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed is scheduled to begin Oct. 2. ACLU attorney Fine said although the dispute with the search companies does not directly involve his organization, until prosecutors "explain what they plan to do with this and provide a detailed explanation, they cannot meet their burden to justify forcing Google to turn over this information." [...]
Privacy watchdogs have worried about the massive store of data that Google has assembled about the online behavior of Internet users. Google keeps log files that record search terms used, Web sites visited and the Internet Protocol address and browser type of the computer for every single search conducted through its Web site. It also sets cookies that can be used to correlate repeat visits to the company's growing network of Web sites.
Sherwin Siy, staff counsel at the privacy rights advocacy organization Electronic Privacy Information Center, praised Google for fighting the administration's request. However, he said there would not even be an issue if the search engine hadn't collected the information and made it aggregatable in the first place.
"This continual aggregation of people's search streams and all this information and the other data from their other services like Gmail places privacy at risk. This is something you would think Google should have anticipated," he said. "It is not a recent phenomenon that overbroad government investigations will put people's privacy at risk by digging through business records."
EPIC's Siy said AOL and MSN should have fought the government's demands. "In not doing anything to protect the privacy of their customers they are not doing the right thing," he said. "They are taking the easy way out." [...]