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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."
People. Get a grip. Most companies will comply with government subponeas. Don't get your hopes too high that Google will hold it's ground either. In fact I think they're playing with fire.
The ONLY way to protect against this sort of information being used by law enforcement is to never collect it in the first place. Only collect statistical obfuscated data and you won't have these problems - how valid and accurate your statistics based on aggregate data will be is another matter though.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I accidentally found out one day that its possible for not-so-legal images to show up on a google image search. (i was searching for something unrelated which happened to be close to the name of a magazine which isn't so nice. a european publication.) I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut that you could find worse stuff through GIS (images.google.com)
The thumbnails are stored at a google location.
Does that mean that Google itself is hosting illegal files?
I really hate children. The war against adulthood has forced me to make a choice, and that is... I hate children. More importantly... I hate the parents of children who think they have any more right than the rest of us.
Ok, I dont really hate children, but you can see my frustration with this and the arguement "its for the good of the children"
People dont even use the V-chip, and those same people will lobby our government with hopes of ridding the planet of porn.
Microsoft and Apple should just build in a complete censorship layer into their OS that can be attributed to a certain user level account.
That way if your child searches breast... and finds a sweet pair of titties... its your own dam fault and not googles.
A few weeks ago I submitted an Ask Slashdot question to the editors about creating a Slashdot Political Action Network. My question still shows pending, but maybe this latest outrage is a good time for me to post my idea to the public forum. Here's my idea:
Why not set up a method in Slasdhot whereby YRO and related articles have a link that allows a registered user to forward his forum comments to his/her appropriate representative(s) in their district? Non-profits are doing this now with great effect. Instead of preaching to the choir, shouldn't our +5 Insightful comments be forwarded to our representatives and news agencies. Can you just imagine the effect we could have by Slashdotting Congress!!!
A lot of people will say that nobody in Congress reads email, but that's not entirely true. Your opinions are put in For and Against piles and some are even read; I know this from personal experience. By hitting Congress and the news agencies we also generate awareness for many issues that go largely unreported like black box voting, DMCA, and so on.
So Slashdot editors, how about it?
X
From the Google has been sued link in a previous comment:
The Feds are not after this data in the matter of a criminal case. They are not after the data because they want to know how many people are searching for porn. They're after the data because they want to use it to bolster their case for the Child Online Protection Act, an act which is a thinly veiled attempt to push anti-porn decency laws.
So, yeah, you might want to think of it as an abuse of power. Whether it's a legitimate abuse of power or not will probably become a matter for the courts very soon.