Justice Dept. Rejects Google's Privacy Concerns

Philip K Dickhead writes "The Associated Press is reporting that the Justice Department rejected Google's concerns over a Bush administration demand to examine millions of its users' Internet search requests on privacy grounds. The department claims this will help revive an online child protection law that the Supreme Court has blocked, by proving that Internet filters are not strong enough to prevent children from viewing pornography online. A federal court hearing is scheduled in San Jose, California, March 13th."

Comments

War on porn

[October_30th]

Is this a surprise? The Bush admin is waging a war on porn and this is a logical step.

But...

[keyne9]

...wait, I thought censorship was bad and UnAmerican(TM)?

Re:But...

[Valdrax]

...wait, I thought censorship was bad and UnAmerican(TM)?

Only if you're some sort of commie liberal! In this post-9/11 world, UnAmerican is anything that criticizes the government, and anything the government does in violation of the Constitution and its amendments is kosher as long as it's to protect Americans from Evil People.

Really, though, who's surprised at this. Their stated agenda here was to invade privacy to bolster a case for overturning a Supreme Court decision that prevents them from invading privacy... for the children, of course. Considering how much this administration has stacked every single non-partisan agency with as many political operatives as possible, it's no real surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor.

Hell, even without that, it's no surprise that the DoJ would rule in its own favor. They've never been the most objective of agencies.

Who gave the DoJ jurisdiction?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google should be forced to turn over evidence in response to a court's order, and by nothing less. The DoJ can shove it.

Since When?

[TheWorkz]

Since when did the government start caring about our children. I have a simple solution, Don't leave your child on your computer with internet access alone. When they are old enough to browse and be responsible by themselves, they are old enough to look at porn.. BUSH ADMIN, quit wasting resources on BS and fix the real issues at hand.. Like our Deficit, the war, social security and countless other items. Leave the parenting up to us.

No surprise...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Is this a surprise? The Bush admin is waging a war on porn and this is a logical step.

Logical yes.. but one gets the feeling that this has more to do with getting yet another controversial surveillance law enacted by attatching it to a campaign against child porn. The clever aspect of this tactic is that it is hard to be against this sort of a law because it is probably one of the the best ways to hunt down one of the most revolting but also elusive and dangerous species of pervert out there. On the other hand experience teaches us that once it is in place, such a law allowing the US. Govt. agencies to rifle through peoples search queries to their hearts content, is guaranteed to be massively abused by those same agencies for all sorts of other reasons that have nothing to do with catching pedophiles.

Re:No surprise...

[Anonymous Coward]

it is hard to be against this sort of a law because it is probably one of the the best ways to hunt down one of the most revolting but also elusive and dangerous species of pervert out there.

No. Not really. Catching people who view child porn does nothing to help catch the ones who are actually making child porn. And even they are only a minority of the people who are actually ruining lives by abusing kids.

If you want to stop 70% of sexual abuse of children, lock up their fathers. To stop another 30%, lock up their other close relatives too. You can knock off the next 8% by stopping them going to school. The tiny handful actual elusive pedophiles are involved in the remaining 2% of abuse. They are not a big problem, if you look at the full picture.

Seriously. If you want to save the maximum number of children from the horrors of sexual abuse, target fathers, not strangers.

Of course, that requires us to admit that the temptation to abuse children is, in fact, a natural part of human nature, just like the temptation to steal, the temptation to murder, and the temptation to cheat on your wife. The people who abuse kids sexually are not "monsters" or "perverts"... they're ordinary people, just like me, just like you, who have given in to one of the many dark sections of our nature, just like I have in other ways, just like you have in other ways.

That's why people are so afraid of pedophiles. Because they know that in other circumstances, it could so easily have been them...

Data Usefullness

[_Sprocket_]

From the article:

The Justice Department submitted a declaration by Philip B. Stark, a researcher who rejected the privacy concerns, noting that the government specifically requested that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.

"The study does not involve examining the queries in more than a cursory way. It involves running a random sample of the queries through the Google search engine and categorizing the results," Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

So... exactly what information is these representatives of the US Government after? The fact that people search for porn? If they remove any identification of who, and thus what, the person is... what's going to tell them that any given search conducted by a wide-eyed innocent (queue Bush jokes) vs. a consenting adult?

Re:Data Usefullness

[An. (Coward)]

So... exactly what information is these representatives of the US Government after? The fact that people search for porn? If they remove any identification of who, and thus what, the person is... what's going to tell them that any given search conducted by a wide-eyed innocent (queue Bush jokes) vs. a consenting adult?

IANAL, but.

The government has tried repeatedly to censor the Internet over the past decade. The stated intention is to prevent minors from accessing material deemed harmful to minors, and whenever the issue comes up, elected officials of both parties fall all over themselves to make it look like they're doing all they can to protect the children (won't somebody please think of the children?!?)

The Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed about 7-1/2 years ago; it set a penalty of $50,000 and/or six months imprisonment on anyone who, for commercial purposes, makes information available online deemed harmful to children, without performing adequate checks on a user's age (e.g. credit card verification or user certificate). The Supreme Court blocked enforcement of the act because it intruded on protected First Amendment speech and because the government had failed to prove that the intent of the law could not be achieved through less intrusive means than, say, commercial filtering products that parents can buy and install on their own computers.

I expect that the government's intention here is two-fold.

First, they want to demonstrate that the problem of material "harmful to minors" is so widespread that no filtering product can be effective in blocking access, thus reopening the door to punishments levied against Web publishers. They don't have evidence of that themselves, so they're trying to force Google to make the case for them.

Second, they're trying to shove the camel's nose into Google's tent--to set a precedent for future demands. If they can demand information on legal, constitutionally protected searches, they can demand it for anything. Google will become just another input into Bush's Orwellian data mining universe.

Parents!

[lennart78]

Once more, a nice display of reverse logics! If I, as a parent, fail to keep track of what my child is doing and/or looking at, I find someone to blame. And the federal government is backing me up on this one.

If you have a small child, you, as a parent, should be aware of what kind of content your child has access to. Preview television shows, whitelist certain webpages. If you leave smutty magazines lying around the house, do you blame the editor if a child finds them and looks through it?

Besides, sex is a natural thing, use education to enable your child to discern right from wrong, instead of keeping the whole subject hidden from him/her until marriage.

Google has nothing to do with this battle the right-wing christians wage against the porn industry. I'm not saying that pornsites should advertise all over the net, or judge porn altogether, but the federal government is taking a very one-sided approach in this matter. The net has always been free, and it should remain that way. I agree with Googles view on this matter.

So let me get this straight

[A beautiful mind]

Children need protection from porn, because it would be too bad if they would discover their sexuality on a normal speed which coupled with a good sexual education program can significantly reduce the number of underage pregnancies, on the other hand the administration encourages and is fine with the military recruiting from schools, sharing schoolchildren's data in a huge opt-out database and sending these kids to Iraq or Afghanistan.

Clearly, porn is the danger here. Think of the kids!

Re:So let me get this straight

[A beautiful mind]

"Is "normal speed" age 6-8, and is the place for "good sexual program" the internet?"

The real question is, should kids at the age of 6-8 use a COMPLEX electronic equipment at all without parental supervision?

If you think they should, is it the government's job to protect them instead of their parents?

Personally I think that kids under 10 shouldn't be exposed to porn, but that is a parental responsibility to take care of. I don't see the government planning to ban sexual content from television in it's whole, because if we assume the same amount of parental neglect which surfing for porn on the internet would assume, then it is entirely likely that young children can stay up and watch porn on tv after 11 or something.

Government motives

[Valdrax]

Oh, Chinese are leftist, current US Government is viewed as Right Wing. Silly me!

Hoo boy. A partisan. Guess what? Just because you take somebody's side on one issue (like Google and the DoJ) doesn't mean that you have to take their side on another issue (like Google and China). Yes, shocking -- I know.

My main complaint is in why the government wants this data. I'm less happy with Google after the China bit, but I'm more unhappy with China itself. In case you didn't know, China also claims that censorship of porn and terrorism are their major reasons for filtering the internet. A lot of people don't know that despite being officially atheist, the Chinese government spends just as much time beating the drum of public morality as many openly religious political organizations.

Re:Google Gives US The Finger, But Gives Head To P

[typical]

Or *maybe* it's because Chinese law and social norms state that the Chinese government gets to censor. US law and social norms state that the current administration doesn't get to demand data of random companies (without criminal investigation or other justification) to push their partisian issues.

1) Much of Google's assets are their search data.

2) Google has a reputation to protect. If they don't draw a line in handing over data, people cannot trust that their searches are private. If I can go use a search engine based on Sealand instead of Google because that one is private because it doesn't fall under US law, then obviously I'm going to use that. Google is protecting their customer.

Man, you Google-haters *love* to try to use the "but teh chinks is evil!" argument.

this is not a privacy issue

[thisislee]

...At least not for the average googler(of course it is a privacy issue for google itself) The government is not asking for records of who searched for what. All they want is statistics on behavior of googlers as a whole with no identifying information.

That said, Google's real argument is that this puts on undue burden on them, the government has no reason to expect that this data is at all useful, this data, by the govenrment's admission, is not ment to be used as evidence, and that this data could be used to discover trade secrets.

Most people seem to be complaining that this is very bad because it violates their own privacy. It seems like it's very bad moreso because the government is abusing its power to force Google to give it information that may hurt its business most likely in order to use shotty science to further its religious conservative agenda.

Re:Google Gives US The Finger, But Gives Head To P

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a court case the Justice Department has lost at the Supreme Court level. They want to re-open discovery and take it against a third-party with no connection to the case. They want to, in their discovery, conduct a fishing expedition with no chance of proving what they claim they are looking for. (Google does not have any info on the age the people who search using their earch engine. How could they?)

China? I think you are thinking about Yahoo who helped China to silence a journalist. If you can find Google doing the same thing in China that they are not doing in this case in the U.S., please let us know. Until then, your twisted sexual fantasies need some work.

Furthermore, the situation is quite a bit different in China in that everyone knows that the government fully monitors Internet usage and doing so is not a violation of the law, as the Chinese government has no Bill of Rights to uphold. The way the Bush administration spits on the Bill of Rights in the U.S., I think you have your villains mixed up.

Re:So what if a child sees pr0n on the Internet?

[cecom]

I mean rubbing the clitoris gently and firmly is not that hard a concept!

Well, this is somewhat of an oversimplifaction - you obviously lack the experience of a true master :-) Things like the pressure, the rythm and and sensitivity can vary significantly from female to female ... Constant and disciplined training with different partners is the only path to greatness.

BTW, I am not speaking from experience - I read this on the Internet when I was 8 ...