Feds want Google Searches for COPA lawsuit
 

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercu...s/13657303.htm

By Howard Mintz
Mercury News
Jan. 18, 2006

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 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.''

``Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Wong said.

The government argues that it needs the information as it prepares to once again defend the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act in a federal court in Pennsylvania. The law was struck down in 2004 because it was too broad and could prevent adults from accessing legal porn sites.

However, the Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn.

As a result, government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn. To back that claim, the government has subpoenaed search engines to develop a factual record of how often Web users encounter online porn and how Web searches turn up material they say is ``harmful to minors.''

The government indicated that other, unspecified search engines have agreed to release the information, but not Google.

``The production of those materials would be of significant assistance to the government's preparation of its defense of the constitutionality of this important statute,'' government lawyers wrote, noting that Google is the largest search engine.

Google has the largest share of Web searches with 46 percent, according to November 2005 figures from Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo is second with 23 percent, and MSN is third with 11 percent.

Staff writer Mike Bazeley contributed to this report.

feds want my balls

scramble, scramble -- long nails are useless in mid-water.

The article is confusing.

The government seems to be mixing two things - trying to stop underage people from accessing adult websites and "child porn".

When a 17 year old kid looks at a dirty picture on the internet, that has nothing to do with some sick or evil person taking pictures or abusing an underage person for sex (child porn).

Which one are they saying that the Google results that they are illegally trying to get ahold of will be used for?

One of the problems with the government is that anytime they want to censor legal content, the first thing they start doing is yelling "child porn" even if it has nothing to do with the actual action they are taking.

If Google doesn't turn over all of their private search records to the government, then it proves they are supporting "child porn"! If you run an adult website, you support "child porn"! If you don't vote for Bush, you are supporting "child porn"! If you don't support the Iraq war, you support "child porn"! It's almost as bad as the "terrorism" bullshit.

wow this is pretty scary. think what the feds could do if they could get log files of a week's worth of google searches. Talk about a roadmap of who are the players of the industry and who is involved in the middle between consumer and the paysites.

That sums it up.

Plus they will be getting information on citizens from other countries I assume. Let's not stop at violating the civil rights of our own people, spread it around.

For their case, I believe the information is generally available without a lot of effort. Link and keyword popularity is available from google without a court order. If it is my personal information they want, they can hack away at my computers like every one else does.

:thumbsup To Google for saying no and fighting it.

Irak Afganistan Terrorism Bin Laden Saddamist


Online Pornography + Child porn

woah that new tactic from the Bush admin proved to work ... they will use it again agaisn't us.

Too bad the article says that some other search engines are not fighting for the privacy rights of their users.

I'd be curious to know which search engines caved to the Feds, I know I'd be less likely to use their other services in the future.

:1orglaugh

Do the adult/porn/webmaster rightwingers allow me to take off my TinFoil hat ????
Seems it is not needed ...

i have no idea if this is relevent or not, but the CIA publically announced a deal with Inktomi (now Yahoo search) back in 2002. Did you know the CIA has a comany called 'In-Q-Tel' that invests in new technology companies?

http://www.gcn.com/21_17/tech-report/19141-1.html

http://www.in-q-tel.com/about/index.htm

if In-Q-Tel invested in a major search engine, wouldn't the In-Q-Tel management be able to call some internal shots?

Too bad the government has thier heads too far up their asses to figure out how to find and shut down child porn sites.

here's to the feds :sleep :sleep :sleep

According to BoingBoing, While Google said no, it was Yahoo, AOL, MSN that said yes. :(

same thing goes for the Senate hearings today. they kept bouncing back and forth between CP and children accessing porn - but kept it all under the umbrella of "protecting children"

Yep Yahoo said yes

what did you expect from politicians? :disgust