From today’s Washington Post comes this somewhat disturbing report about a recent subpoena served on Google:
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.
Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.
And why, pray tell, does the DOJ need this information ?
The government contends it needs the data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches as part of an effort to revive an Internet child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court on free-speech grounds.
The 1998 Child Online Protection Act would have required adults to use access codes or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, and it would have punished violators with fines up to $50,000 or jail time. The high court ruled that technology such as filtering software may better protect children.
The matter is now before a federal court in Pennsylvania, and the government wants the Google data to help argue that the law is more effective than software in protecting children from porn
Here’s hoping that the subpoena is quashed.
Update 1/20/06: Boing Boing is reporting that the government also requested similar data from Yahoo, AOL, and MSN. Unlike Google, these companies complied with the request. More information can be found at Search Engine Watch.
Technorati Tags: Google Subpoena, Google, Internet Freedom, Privacy
