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Google Avoids Surrendering Search Info
Mercury News has details of a San Francisco judge's decision that Google should give the DoJ some details on its search engine, but is not required to turn over records to the government. From the article: "McElvain emphasized the study would be more meaningful if it included search requests processed by Google, which by some estimates fields nearly half of all online queries in the United States. Ware concurred with the Justice Department on that point, writing in his order that 'the government's study may be significantly hampered if it did not have access to some information from the most often used search engine.' But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests to conduct its study, prompting him to conclude the Web site addresses would be adequate." Reaction to the news is available on the Google Blog.
request that it turn over anonymous search data for some lame research project.
But they roll over when the ChiCom dictatorship orders them to censor democracy.
Color me not impressed.
I'm a little confused why Google should legally be required to give the government anything. The government wants to do a study. Great. They can ask (or perhaps even offer to pay) for information they need, but why should they be able to get whatever they want, for nothing? Has Google commited a crime? Are they searching for evidence for a specific crime? Will the data they get from Google be used in any ongoing investigations? If no to all of the above, why should they get some information? They want to do a study, so what? Why should that mean Google has to give them anything it doesn't want to?
The government doesn't do wiretaps.
It doesn't hold people without a trial.
It doesn't start a war without obvious cause.
It doesn't enrich the friends of the politicians.
Oooh.. Looky Looky! Look at that shiny thing over THERE.
How can George Bush get a subpoena in the first place. It's seems odd that a president can compel the private sector to divulge information in the pursuit of political policy.
Plus this is from the Executive branch which doesn't even make the law.
Let Congress pursue this if it wants. It has the responsibilty of making the laws, not the president.
The Constitution gives the president authority over the military and cabinet; the power to grant pardons and make appointments. And thats about it. Not sure where the Executive is coming from with this crap.
The easy and obvious counterargument to the 'you have nothing to hide' line is to point out that it should not be required of a citizen to explain their daily actions on the basis that they look suspicious, as we each do a dozen things every day that could seem out of context to be nefarious or at least odd. The trick is to convince those who actually write this legislative crap.
Somebody ought to surveille every member of Congress for a week or so, and then e-mail them pointed questions about the footage (even if there is nothing untoward, innocuous actions can look suspicious, and of course that's the whole point), and then cc the footage and the questions to a local news outlet...that'd dampen the legislative hankering for citizen surveillance tout suite.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
People have no problem forking over all of their personal information to the private sector. Credit card companies know what you buy and where. Amazon has statistical models that identify (often correctly), books you might like when you buy another book. Even power companies have models that can generally predict your power usage patterns by demographic and weather forecasts. But, oh, no, if the "government" gets all this stuff, its the end of the world. Ironically, denying the government access to information already freely shared in the corporate world only stacks the deck towards giving corporations the upper hand over government.
This is my sig.
Ironically, denying the government access to information already freely shared in the corporate world only stacks the deck towards giving corporations the upper hand over government.
;-) )
Maybe you weren't aware, but corps only have the power that the government lets them have. The government is vastly more powerful than any coporate entity and has essentially unlimited resources. If you make a list of organzations to be wary of the government is _always_ at the top of the list. The only thing that holds them back is accountability to the people (I won't debate how well that works
The private sector, at worst, sends you some junk mail and tries to sell you something. If they've processed their data correctly, then you probably are interested. The worst that can happen is that they don't process their data correctly and you get offers on stuff you're not interested in.
The government, on the other hand, can do a lot worse than send you some poorly-targeted advertisements. Being targeted as a potential terrorist can do tremendous damage to your life. You could lose your job, be incarcerated (without trial, incedentally), and possibly get your face blasted across the news.
Because you don't have the right to tell others what they can an can not do. As long as they are not hurting someone else, everyone should be able to go about their business. Its peoples right to privacy in how they find porn, via using google or MS search is what is at steak here, not the children. The conservitive right, I think, is what is pushing this DoJ to do this in hoping to get what you want, porn off the internet. But let me tell you this, if it wasn't for porn, there would be a lot of technology that might not have taken off. DVD, internet streaming of video, probably all would have died and be forgotten. Now if this is a funny rant, you got me, but I really think you mean what you say.
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What I want to know is - Is there anyway that the government can use this and will get information (ie search requests) that is formed by people in countries other than the US.
i.e. not just getting info on its own citizens but on those from abroad simply because they may have used Google.com as opposed to Google.fr
It would clearly mess up the stats for the research wouldn't it.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Google's last line in their blog is really frustrating to me:
When a party resists an overbroad subpoena, our legal process can be an effective check on such demands and be a protector of our users.
The checks and balances system has failed us completely. To resist an overbroad subpoena, one must have both incredible financial strength as well as incredible legal strength. Companies much smaller than Google don't have either -- and the courts seem to accept any growth in government strength as a new standard whenever a smaller company just gives in to government requests.
This country was founded on an idea that the Federal government was to be set up to promote the general welfare of the people -- not by making a police state nor a welfare state. The Federal government was here to protect the rights of the people by making sure that the individual states didn't trample on these rights. Beyond that, the Federal government was given a few BASIC powers over the people and the state -- very very basic powers.
National security was a power for the government in its ability to defend the borders and call up the militia to keep out intruders. National security was NOT about policing the citizens of the country, this was left to the individual states to decide what is criminal and what is acceptable.
I am very mad that the average citizen doesn't see what has happened. Instead of having a federal government with very limited powers -- which can't be controlled by any amount of money -- we have a federal government with unlimited powers controllable by the highest bidder. If the highest bidder has any reason to restrain government, they can do so with the right legal aid. Yet the common man (the minority of 1) -- the most important facet of a free system -- has no power to do anything but fall victim to the wants of the masses. If the masses are ignorant, the minority of 1 will find themselves without any rights because no one came to their aid.
This has nothing to do with money, mind you. This only has to do with a federal government that is no longer a servant but a master, and the belief of the citizens that they're still able to stop Leviathan through voting.
The private sector does not have the ability to interrogate/arrest me for owning a copy of _________ (insert any controversial book here), or the ability to interrogate/arrest me by querying a search engine for something like "join jihad" (if I were insterested in how militant muslims would go about doing so).
Your version of mal-intent by coroporations is one thing - they want to brainwash me into buying their products so their wallets become fatter. That doesn't even hold a candle to the mal-intent a government could achieve by possessing the same info.
Common sense? That's actually exactly what I find to be severely lacking on the judge's part in this case. If he *really* had some common sense, he would've said, in essence, "there's no legal basis for requiring Google to hand out *any* data if there's not a criminal investigation going on, so go away, n00bs".
If the government demanded that you pay an extra 1000 USD in taxes even though there's no legal reason for them to ask for that, and if a judge then decided that 1000 is too much but that 500 is OK, would you also say that's reasonable? Of course not. There's no middle ground here - you either stick to the law or you don't. Sadly, in this case, neither the government nor the judge did; the former's not surprising, of course, but the latter is.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I wrote a story about this late January. Let me quote myself to remind ya'all of some important insights into this story:
"While Google is reacting to the government request by refusing and resisting, other "leading search engines" seem less eager to protect their users right to privacy.
It should be pointed out that:
* Yahoo,
* Microsoft and
* America Online
have all turned records over to The Bush administration."
Be very aware of this. Google is the only search engine who put up a fight on this issue! The other "leading" search engines willingly, without question, handed over all information asked for. Google in their glory avoided giving out information, the rest didn't even put up a fight. Your Google searches may be protected - for now - but the rest of your searches are now "safe" in the hands of the US Justice Department.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Instead of about google, the story should now turn to the other search engines: They apparently turned over "personal data" to government people who didn't have just cause!!
I'd be seriously upset if my search engine would give my personal data to just anybody who doesn't have the right to such data.
The feds are trying to defend their Internet child-protection law. They wanted to know how much porn is searched for on the major search engines. They asked for random search data that doesn't identify users in any way.
So because the information is anonymous, they have a right to mine corporate owned information to attempt to resurrect a series of laws that have been repeatedly found unconsitutional? You describe porn as if it were something illegal, a problem that they are reasonably working to eliminate. And the government shares your position I'm sure. But somehow the "they're just attacking pornography" argument doesn't sway me much. Pornography involves peoples' right to explore their sexuality as they see fit, including selling video or photographs of said sexuality for the means of making money and helping other people enjoy their sexuality. The government disagrees with this protected practice (shielded by case law), and is looking for a way to implement their standard wedge method to make it impractical since they can't make it illegal. They are doing so under the guise of protecting children. This demand for "random search data" whether it is anonymous or not, is entirely inappropriate and private corporations which have rights of their own, should not be at the disposal of the government to provide them with commercial information in order to further their attempts to override peoples' rights through misrepresented over-restrictive impracticality.
That would be like the government demanding that the credit card agencies turn over all of the charge records of a random sampling of 50,000 Americans so the government could better understand peoples' spending habits. What you've done by condoning such government abuses of power is essentially hand the government the right to "explore" all private information for the purpose of "research" so they can advance their legal agenda of chipping away at peoples' rights using the wedge method and by over-regulating businesses they don't like.