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DoJ search requests: Yahoo, AOL, MSN said "Yes"
d2viant writes "Elaborating on a previous article on Slashdot, it appears that the search engines which complied for Department of Justice requests for logs were apparently AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. According to the article, Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound."
I hope not. I hate child porn and all that, but that doesn't mean that big brother should be watching everything.
Yay, I have a sig.
....then at least in balls to stand up against , google wins by a tremendously big margin.
Time and time again we hear about privacy, freedoms and liberties in the US being restricted in favour of "security". This is just one small example in a field of many. Now I ask a question to all Americans: do you actually feel any safer? If you do, please explain.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Is there a reason that the DoJ needs information from all of the search engines? At some point, can't we make a statistical comparison and say that since x% of results in AOL / MSN / Yahoo were for this subject, that google most likely is in the same area?
I mean are the users of google search that much different than AOL / MSN / Yahoo???
Does the DoJ need a complete analysis? If so, let's hand this over to the US Census bureau.
The issue is not about child porn. It is about kids watching porn, which frankly makes a nice excuse.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
Aren't subpoenas supposed to be reserved for matters where there is some kind of trial involved? Surely the government can't just subpoena information for research purposes.
Why would MSN, Yahoo, and AOL be so eager to cooperate? I can't believe that these corporations care one way or the other about people viewing porn. So what is it? Are they hoping that by cooperating they get some special favors later, or do they fear recrimination by the Bush administration if they refuse?
It is interesting how many of the other search engines outside of google bowed down to this. The reason for the search engine logs seems quite shady to me, and seems like a ruse just to get access for some other purpose. I have a feeling Google probaby detected this and has decided that the intent of the log request is much deeper and shadier than it looks.
People. Get a grip.
The grip-losing isn't about primarily about companies... if George Bush knocked on my door and demanded something, I don't think anybody would hold it against me if I gave him what he wanted. The issue is still the knocking on the door and demanding stuff, that should never have happened.Most companies will comply in a criminal investigation, as they should. This is different; this is the Justice Department abusing the court system to push their agenda. Google stands a good chance of winning this one; even if they don't it's still a huge PR win for them.
Beauty is just a light switch away.
This policy of spying started long before Bush and it will continue after the Bush administration. Citing this battle as one between Bush & Google seems short sided. I hate Bush as much as the next guy(or 49% of you) and it makes sense that the battle to protect privacy goes way beyond just this administration.
And if we go back a few years, we can see all of this COINTELPRO data wasn't to stop foreigners, or even people doing illegal things, but to harrass people like Martin Luther King, or breakins to the Watergate hotel to bug the Democrats. Not like the Democrats have rolled this stuff back when they got into office, Clinton's staff was over-requesting FBI files of people during "filegate".
And we're told it's because of the "War on Terror", which is a war which they never say when it will end. It reminds me of Orwell's 1984, when the government is in a state of permanent war, or war preparation anyhow. I may be older than some Slashdotters, but when I grew up I was told the US only had foreign military bases because of the USSR, and if they weren't targets of attack by Moscow, we wouldn't have them there. A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin wall, I'm now told we are in a new state of permanent war - the cold war has become the war on terror. American military bases still circle the globe - in fact they've expanded, especially in countries south of Russia and west of China. The Russians used to say America had bases all over the world not because of Russia, but because of American imperialism. I was always told this was false, the bases were there because of the possibility of Russian attack. A decade and a half later, what the Russians used to say rings truer than what the US used to say. In fact, the government has now changed its story, and wants us to forget they used to say that, and have us all concentrate on their new permanent war.
The COPA is a bad law. Bad in the sense that it is not doing what it truly seeks to do: curb child exploitation on the internet.
The DOJ is trying to go after child pornographers, but they are making laws for service providers.
This discrepancy is typical of old-school thinking. Stop the profitablility of such activity by going after the people making money in the process, but, especially on the internet, this only servers to inhibit legal providers of porn.
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's all so useless that this entire exercise is a waste of money and time at every level.
Indeed. This is a point that true conservatives should pick up on. I'm not talking about Republican conservatives, of course. I'm talking about the truly patriotic conservatives, who love America with all of their heart. They're the kind of people who have a true respect for responsibility, especially fiscal responsibility.
As unlikely as it may sound now, it may be time for those true conservatives to realize that their party (the Republican party) has been hijacked. It may even be time for the real conservatives in the US to stand together, members of a new party willing to fight for what conservatives truly stand for: responsibility, honesty, peace, prosperity and liberty.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Isn't this just wonderful? First, the government decides it is going to read e-mails and bug phone calls without warrants.
So is Google supposed to feel guilty now?
What's next: the rewards from the government if you "turn in" your neighbours for being Jewish?
Because the motive stated, isn't always the real motive?
Because the administration appears to be getting away with removing all sorts of freedoms from their citizens using reasons such as this?
I agree completely with you that something should be done to crack down on Child Porn, is this really what they are after? Is the bill they are pushing through really going to help?
There have been so many reasons not to trust what they say at face value, is this yet another?
--- I've completed diagnosis of your problem and can classify it as a YOYO...You're On Your Own
I'm not getting it. How do random anonymous search results of any kind assist in determining whether something is constitutionally sound? I take it that they want to make sure the Act is not trampling on anybody's constitutional rights, correct? I'm trying to imagine what you could possibly learn with regards to that, from search results. You can see percentages of people searching for particular things and what they wind up getting as a result. Ok, so you know roughly what random people of unknown ages are searching for, and you have a rough idea of where they might choose to land. I can't find the link to constitutional issues here, so I just have to say: wtf?
Well, I tend to disagree with you. Simply rolling over and playing dead for the DoJ is hardly the answer. I will give Google credit for sticking to its guns for the moment. Google is taking the correct stance, which is to say "nope, we aren't in the business of serving as a political tool, and if you want access to our files you'd better have a damned good reason." Lawfully issued subpoenas for the purpose of investigating specific crimes are one thing, raiding a corporate database en-masse because you want evidence to support a law which multiple Federal courts have already struck down is something else entirely. Our government is becoming entirely too cavalier with our privacy (the Department of Justice almost seems to feel entitled to find out anything it wants about us) and I wish more companies had the kind of cojones that Google has put on display.
Even if Google (or any other database outfit) decides not to collect personally identifiable data, the government (which has found mining of private databases very rewarding) will simply mandate that such collection occur. This is already happening in Europe, with new data retention laws. In the EU, not collecting such information is not an option, and I'd much rather such nonsense didn't propagate to the United States. Simply allowing the government to steamroller what remains of our ability to keep our stuff private is playing with fire on an even greater scale.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
To be honest - I've been skeptical about Google for some time. I was not sure how I felt about a company who's sole purpose in life was to perform the same services as Yahoo! but market it as "not evil". Sucessfully so, I might add. I honestly doubted their "Don't be evil" mission.
After reading up about the other companies quietly folding under White House pressure, I am honestly relieved to see SOMEONE finally standing up for the rights of our citizens. Rights are NEVER erroded all at once. The day will never come when we wake up and the amendment about free speech is removed from the Consitution. The day WILL come, however, when we wake up and the free speech amendment means nothing because several iterations of the "Patriot Act" have erroded what it really means.
People in this country need to seriously wake the fuck up. We've been through several iterations of errosion of our rights under this white house. Allow me to sum up: 1) Plame's identity leaked (treason according to the law - I eagerly await the hangings), 2) The Patriot Act (need I say more?), 3) CIA spying on US citizens (notice how quickly W. moved on catching the traitors that leaked that), and 4) This request for search records. The day is rapidly approaching when we wake up and our rights will not mean anything ALL IN THE NAME OF PROTECTING US FROM [insert irrational fear here].
Today, I for one, take my hat off to Google. At the least, even if they are required to acquiese in the end, it garned media attention on the shifty White House request. It will be a long time before I doubt "Don't be evil." again.
Justice is not requesting this data in the course of a criminal investigation, but in order to defend its argument that the Child Online Protection Act is constitutionally sound."
Sure they aren't. And NSA is only wiretapping terrorists.
Kythe
Pictures of the naked body, no matter what age is not illegal. It's the acts that are protrayed in some pictures that cross the line and make it illegal.
OR ... they could not build a complete censorship layer into their OS. And if your child searches 'breast" ... and finds a sweet pair of titties ... it's your own damn fault for not monitoring their internet usage, not Google's. ;)
Who doesn't like free music?
Suppose they really did not provide any personally identifiable information. There is still the fact that the government has the clout to demand information from some of the nation's largest companies and they are willing to provide it without a warrant or a fight. It sets a very bad precident. Powers the government may use are powers that it may abuse.
Do you really think that real child pornographers are going to look for things through Google without any kind of redirection?
What do they think, that we criminals are stupid? Anyone heard of proxies, remembering/bookmarking URL's, non-USA search engines?
This is really a stupid thing going on. This government and laws passing in the "great" United States of America makes me remember of the witchhunt for "communists" about 50y ago. It's happening all over again but now you just have to accuse that neighbour you don't like of filesharing, terrorism or kiddie-porn-searches. And anyone remembers those commies from half a decade ago? No, media, government and agency's are all trying to cover it up as if it never happened or that 'it wasn't that bad'.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Down with the career politician! SUPPORT TERM LIMITS
Yet, at the same time, the 16 year old (hell, 14 year old) is old enough and mature enough to be tried as an adult and sentenced as an adult.
Cool eh?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
- Iraq has WMD and we have proof (being that Iraq is trying to procur plutonium in nigeria but disproved by the NSA AND the CIA).
- The patriot act will only be used against terrorist.
- We would only operate within the confines of the patriot act.
- We will balance the budget.
- We will lower the defict.
- We only spy on terrorist and only with warrents.
- I will fire any traitor in the white house (one has been caught, and he quit; more to come).
- Sibel Edmunds is a security risk (well, at this time, we still do not know.
- Global warming is not happening.
- Ok, global warming is occuring, but it is natural and man can not influence it.
- We will catch OBL.
- The war in Iraq is over.
- The war in afghanastan is over.
- No information was obtained from the airlines.
- The information from the one airline did not go into TIA.
Now, trust us that this info will go into protecting children. These are the same "no child left behind" that was not funded.Hummmmm.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In fact, I feel less safe. WAY less safe. Now I have to worry about all the people in the world who are pissed at me for being an American, the new people in the world who hate me because W has pissed them off, and now I have to worry about my own government spying on me and throwing me in jail if I type something into a search engine that returns something naughty.
And that can happen without you doing anything wrong. Ever type in a search that returned a few surprises? How about your wireless access point. Are you SURE it can't be hacked? You BETTER be.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Hell, it's a lot easier than that. If you have an email account, anyone can make you a criminal by emailing you some kiddie porn and then calling the authorities to report its presence on your computer. Even if you delete it as soon as you realize what it is, you stilled viewed it, you still posessed it, and the incriminating evidence is still on your hard drive...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
These search engines have no right and no compulsion to turn over any customer data, anonymous or otherwise, in response to politically motivated fishing expeditions.
Legally speaking, U.S. people under 18 aren't supposed to be looking at any kind of porn. They aren't legally allowed to drink, smoke, or vote, either.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
So now a block of searches associates the name Geekotourist with rockets and with one or two addresses. Does this affect my privacy if these searches are clumped together?
Did Yahoo/AOL include any white pages or yellow pages searches while doing the government's homework? Does the government expect Google to keep all Google Local searches out of the "1 week of searches"? The white page and local style searches leak personal info like mad.
Or what if a search was designed to check on one's personal privacy, for example:
And while Y/AHOOL didn't provide "the results of the searches" to the gov't, I assume the gov't will be re-running them. The searches 'Cameras near 742 Evergreen Terrace' combined with 'photographing children' may have just been me helping with photos at a birthday party or finding a portrait studio. But its going to be analyzed by people who think 15-degrees-of-separation is a reasonable search.
From the prescient (and unfortunately being used as an anti-guidebook) best essay this century on Why Privacy is a Fundamental Human Right [just substitute 'Porn' for 'September 11' as the excuse the gov't gives, it comes out the same]:
"But though we tend to take it for granted, privacy - the right to control access to ourselves and to personal information about us - is at the very core of our lives. It is a fundamental human right precisely because it is an innate human need, an essential condition of our freedom, our dignity and our sense of well-being.
"If someone intrudes on our privacy - by peering into our home, going through the personal things in our office desk, reading over our shoulder on a bus or airplane, or eavesdropping on our conversation - we feel uncomfortable, even violated.
"Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do.
"If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.
But there also will be tangible, specific harm.
"The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"...But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and
Since everybody else is saying "no", I'll say "yes". I think that Americans feel a lot safer.
At least, they feel a lot safer than they did on September 12, 2001. Americans were pretty spastic then, and that's why PATRIOT Act I was passed pretty quietly. They were scared. I was scared. It was pretty frickin' scary.
Today, they feel a lot safer. The follow-up attack that everybody expected never materialized. They're not glued to CNN. They're not kissing their wives perhaps a final good-bye on the way out the door going to work. (I did.) They've gotten more or less back to normal. They're still kinda scared, but since I grew up with Mutually Assured Destruction breathing down my neck, me and a lot of other Americans are kind of used to low-grade, continual fear.
That's the Devil's Advocate answer. Now, do they feel safe for the right reasons? Maybe; maybe not. Why haven't there been any more attacks? Because we invaded Afghanistan and knocked out the Taliban? Because of the invasive techniques the FBI and NSA are using? Because of ordinary law enforcement? Because one big attack was all Osama had in him? I don't know.
And, as another poster pointed out, none of that has anything to do with porn. Neither me nor any of my friends is afraid of porn, so I don't have a read on that. Do "ordinary Americans" feel that their kids are being protected from porn? Probably not, but not for Bush's lack of trying; the laws he's tried to pass have all been struck down.
Would they feel safer if they had been passed? I doubt it. This is a stupid law they're trying to justify, and they're going about it in an offensive way. I appreciate Google saying "no", and I hope the courts back them up.
The Republic I grew up loving is on life support, at best.
I think the Republic you thought you grew up loving was an illusion. Today, the US government probably has fewer ways of getting away with screwing you, screwing other nations, or restricting your speech than ever before. That doesn't keep them from trying, but that's what governments always do--it's part of the package. Furthermore, you have more ready access to education and information and more social mobility than ever before.
The debt is real, but ultimately not due to any particular policy--it's just that the rest of the world is starting to recover from colonialism and WWII and become serious competition again; Americans will have to get used to being less wealthy relative to the rest of the world.
And if your child searches 'breast" ... and finds a sweet pair of titties ... it's your own damn fault for not monitoring their internet usage, not Google's.
Why is it that humanity once, when we were sitting around nude in caves, had the maturity to see breasts, but no longer does?
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
It really is worrisome, that a president can break the law but is not immediately sitting in court. I think this is telling. The political system in the US is not set up for rule of law or democracy, but power.
I'm telling you, things are getting worse. Welcome to fachist America, folks!
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I hope not. I hate child porn and all that, but that doesn't mean that big brother should be watching everything.
Agreed.
But if they're gonna be watching me (I personally like Yahoo for the combination of search and headlines), I can assure them that they're going to get a hell of a show. I'll go so far as to create a spider which hunts for kitty porn ("MmMMMmm... Next we have Fluffy the Persian. She's an 8-year-old who can lick her own ass and likes it when her 30-year-old master rubs her stomach.") and then pipes keywords and sentences from that directly into Yahoo and then uses the search results to find more sites to spider.
Naturally, being my first real programming project since University, it will be released open-source in case the community happens to have suggestions on how I can improve its efficiency.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If that were true, shouldn't the parents of every model on childsupermodels.com be brought to court for what they allow? Every site on there is obviously marketed as softcore porn. Now, I'll say that the problem of child porn is vastly overblown in many cases, and I really wouldn't care if the age of consent and the age for legally being in porn were reduced to 16, but there's a big difference between a hot 16 year old that's actually gone through most of puberty, compared to a pre-teens who have no development of sexual features.
I think people are misunderstanding the whole nature of this law and the controversy around it. It's NOT about child porn.
The purpose of this law is to increase censorship on all porn, even legal porn, and it's driven by the Christian Right Wing, supposedly to protect children from viewing it.
That's why it's initially a 1st amendment issue (freedom of speech) which is now becoming a 4th amendment issue (unreasonable search and seizures) as the admin asks for private records. But make no mistake, the dispute is not a "child porn" issue, it's a censorship issue, supposedly to protect children. Big difference.
Child porn is already aggressively investigated by the DOJ, and it's an entirely separate thing. In those investigations, the DOJ has no trouble getting warrants which all the major companies including Google are happy to comply with to catch child pornographers.
It's also a pretty sneaky move by the admin, because obviously nobody likes the words "child" and "porn" anywhere near each other, which distorts and misrepresents the whole issue. So to anyone who took the bait, congrats, you've been had by the Bush admin and their clever spinners.
=P
Those kids broke serious laws, and are being tried as adults usually because they did something extremely bad (or something not so bad, many times). Their own bad choice is what makes them criminals.
Criminals, yes, but it doesn't make them adults. What kind of message does that send, when the only way to be treated as an adult is to do something extremely bad?
If they're mature enough to take full responsibility for their choices, then let them choose a candidate in elections. Let them choose to put their own health in jeopardy with alcohol and tobacco. Let them choose to sign contracts, seek employment, and appear in porn.
On the other hand, if they're not mature enough... if they can't be allowed to make their own choices because they lack knowledge or experience or whatever else you think they need... then don't hold them to the same standard as adults. Don't tell them that the only way to be taken seriously is to become a criminal.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
And because I like being an asshole, I just grabbed one of those cute "time currency conversors" and checked how much $46.7 billion in 1998 would be in 2005's dollars. The number: 55,753,496,932.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
The following are quick links for each popular search engine to perform the search:
Google
Yahoo
MSN
AOL
If a lot of people did it every day, it would eventually skew popular queries, and send a little message, should Google loose the fight.
It's on my blog already. If a ton of people do the same, and get a big campaign going, it could be interesting.
Google: A Patriot's Letter
When will the People expect their leaders to subject to the same laws that immediately get the rest of us locked up? When will the People realize that soon no rights or freedoms will be left and shortly after that nobody will be left to ask why YOU were taken away and held forever, denied due process.
Wake the fuck up America, vote out ALL encumbents and have every single criminal in office see their day in court for breaking a law that should be blind.
http://www.lp.org/
I expect they would
categorize the terms
aggregate the terms via cookie data
profile the cookie owner
correlate the search terms against profiles
and then make inferences that profile A has a X% chance of being a male aged 10-12 and that Y% of people with profile A search for porn
Once they have found politically suitable figures for X and Y for N child like profiles they will announce that this is proof that Something Must Be Done and oh look,, this Bill here will do nicely
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That is because the government is allowing corporations to run them. When a business is being intrusive, that is because the customer signed their rights away. It's called 'read the fine print.' The government is not allowed to do so, but since the worthless are wanting the government to take money at gunpoint since the worthless think the world owes them a living they are actually asking for an intrusive governmnet.
Read more about it here.