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Google's Response to the DoJ Motion
neoviky writes "Google Inc. on Friday formally rejected the U.S. Justice Department's subpoena of data from the Web search leader, arguing the demand violated the privacy of users' Web searches and its own trade secrets.
Responding to a motion by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Google also said in a filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California the government demand to disclose Web search data was impractical."
Google has done plenty wrong. It's posing for the camera. All the DoJ has asked for was search results and statistics. Google releases parts of this information to the public every year on thier own for popular search terms.
What makes this different is that Google doesn't want anyone to know is that many people get thier kiddie porn fix by searching with them. The DoJ's query is to discover how accessable child porn is to people using search engines.
Note, that the statistics Google releases on their own accord are modified and censored to omit the most common searches such as "free porn". With Google's reaction to the DoJ, "kiddie porn" may be on this list of omitted results as well.
Google is trying to make this into a privacy issue, but it's more akin to a tax audit. Someone want to look at the books, and Google doesn't want them to see what they are hiding.
Google is doing plenty wrong.
The government doesn't have the resources for blind fishing expeditions; they are looking for something specific. If you listened to Negropontes speech yesterday, the government is pretty short handed as is, they hardly need another non directed task sopping up resources.
I strongly suspect that what the government is looking for is evidence that Google is being used for things that are compromising to national security, for example, industrial espionage. There has been a lot of concern about that in the intelligence community lately.
What really worries me is that Google certainly appears like it has something to hide, the other organizations subpeonaed yield up the information without hesitation. If Google was really concerned, they could easily scrub identity out of the records, anonymizers are a staple of NORA style text mining and easily written.
Google has some other reason to be so defiant over a simple request, and I really don't buy the facile explanation that it would inhibit searching. I mean, anyone with a packet sniffer can find out google search strings, its not as if searching is done encrypted.
I have never heard anyone worrying about it, though admittedly I am not that knowlegable in the community of paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Whatever Googles reason, it is not to protect searchers identity, since they don't protect it in normal operations and the government isn't asking for it anyways. What is scary is that Google apparently believes the search patterns would reveal something they don't want known.
And that warrants immediate and aggressive investigation.