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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
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- 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.
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
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.
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
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.