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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.
So the government isn't allowed to troll the personal information of every American without the slightest probability of cause? What happened to the "If you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to hide" doctrine?
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
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.
Now we just have to fight "if you're not doing anything bad, you've nothing to hide" -- in a country such as ours, that is heresy against our constitution and the people who live under it. Our general need of having privacy and not being exposed to the world is a natural one and must be protected at all costs. Those who seek to undermine this principal are very treacherous indeed.
-Drache Kubisuro
But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests
Tell me what you search for and I tell you who you are. Kind of obvious what they need this for. I wonder why they do not even come up with a fake reason to hide their true intentions. Are people already considered THAT dumb?
Well, yes. Google denied giving over information that would be considered a breach of privacy for citizens all around the world to a government that is considered bad all over the world. And I'm not talking about China here. And it is censoring searches in China but at the same time not limiting the people's ability to 'out-smart' google and eventually find what they want about 'tiennamenn square'. So, the coloring part is right to the point. ;)
First of all, lame research project is a rather mild way to describe allowing the government to legally data mine America's online usage. If you think anonymous data is "useless" or "lame" you may want to take a look at google's business model and an even harder look at their current market capitalization. Not to mention that once a judge allows the government access to an unlimited amount of anonymous data it becomes a precedent for future hearings on subpeonas for say two or three people's full search/URL history.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
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?
heh!
Could you imagine the implications if they had to turn this data over? Every minor study in the country would be trolling Google for user information. It would all be to "protect the children", of course. Nice to see a judge with a brain stem for the first time in awhile. Of course, no doubt soccer moms and politicians angling for reelection'll be complaining about this for awhile. "Google hates kids and supports child pornography!"
I can't wait. Talk about your no-win scenarios.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
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.
Why does Google hate children? Its not just that, The DoJ is trying to protect everyone from pornography why would anyone want to stop them? People this is one of the most morally destabilizing sins since attacking Americans and we should be adopting the approaches used in the Middle East particularly: Monitoring of all internet access by faith-based guides, gouging of eyes, and strict dress codes that stop the urge in the first place. Google I hope you're happy for all the lives you've destroyed through facilitating this evil.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Instead of emailing the URLs requested by the DOJ, they would hand-write them on paper and send them by mail. Preferably hand-written by 50,000 different people, of course.
There is no reason to make this easy for the government.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Google doesn't make the information disappear entirely. It doesn't "lie" in this sense. The crucial and great aspect of google censoring links is presenting an annoying tag saying in effect 'this search has broken links due to censored content'. This type of notification upsets people since they're effectively treated like children by people in power but otherwise the same as them. Why should anybody see this information when others can't, even simply to censor it to begin with?
Censoring but tagging upsets people. Upset people cause change in the long run when they take action to correct it one way or another. Either the regional rules will change, or people dodge the rules in various ways (such as an encryption/tech vs. communication law/network isolation/spy law arms race until somebody wins). It's far more subtle, though perhaps less satisfying than a "no-censorship or the highway" style standoff, and it's effective.
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.
If you want to determine if filters are protecting children from porn... 1. Go to google.com, search for "porn", etc. 2. Click on the first 1000 results to determine if each is evil. 3. Turn on your filtering software. 4. Go back to step 1, repeat for each filter you are interested in. Alternatively, waste tax payer money and look like an ass by paying lawyers to try to bully information out of private companies.
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.
How many non-Americans have been incarcerated without trial? Who knows, it's classified! The U.S. government reaches far beyond our borders, as does Google.com.
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
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.
As much as I dislike the amount of information that many companies collect on me, at least I can sleep comfortably at night knowing that companies are quite predictable in how they act and what they do - they generally act to maximize profits and accrued value to shareholders. So companies will probably abuse my information in predictable ways, trying to spam me and sell me crap. Additionally, companies are still restricted to some degree by laws set by the government, and by excessively bad PR, which prevent them from some of the most egregious abuses of my privacy imagineable.
The government, on the other hand, is not terrible resource-constrained, lacks the profit motive and instead generally is run by bureaucrats and their institutional imperative to maximize their own power and importance in the world, and politicians seeking to score populist brownie points. This means it can be reactionary, illogical and unprofitable, while seeking to maximize control and power for itself, and suppress those it sees as a threat.
As somebody pointed out, the only thing that constrains this beast is accountability through the electoral process for politicians, and the fear of losing their jobs for bureaucrats.
In short, I think I am right to be far more distrustful of the government having oodles of personal data to mine as it pleases than any corporation.
When Desert Storm hit, Americans rallied and made Saddam toilet paper.
:)
:) Coming soon to thinkgeek?
When 9/11 hit, we made Usama Bin Laden toilet paper.
Someone ought to make this document into toilet paper, since its now officially useless otherwise
It's the American thing to do
The government should just send someone to sit in the lobby of Google where they show everyone's search requests on a giant ticker.
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
People who engage in warfare against the US (or other signatory countries) and are not in the uniform of a nation that has subscribed to the Geneva Convention are not entitled to any of the protections agreed under that convention. If found under arms with terrorists then they too are considered terrorists until such time as the Government determines what they wish to do with them. They are to be treated humanely in US prisons - and yes, I know some were not treated so in Abu Ghareb - those who mistreated them are being held responsible. Humane treatment does not mean they may not be deprived of comfort in an effort to coerce them into divulging information of intelligence value.
Military tribunals are authorized by the US Constitution. Military officers are college educated with multiple graduate level educational opportunities after commissioning - they are knowledgeable of the environments and situations that detainees were captured under. If a jury is involved, military juries have the ability to question witnesses themselves (through the judge) and do not have to rely blindly strictly on which attorney has the greater gift of gab. Many people on learning how the military justice system works have come to believe that if one is innocent it's better to be tried by a military jury - and conversely if one professes to spend the rest of his life looking for the "real killer", then you'd probably want to be tried by a civilian jury.
The government is defending the Child Online Protection Act against constitutional challenges. If you're in a court case you can compel people to come and testify, or simply force them to produce documents with relevant evidence, which is what the government claimed to be doing. If you overreach the judge can slap you down, which is what happened here.
>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.
The idea of the federal government protecting people from the states is a post-Civil War innovation. Reading the Federalist Papers is an eye opener. The Founders actually envisioned the exact opposite, that the central government couldn't trample the people's rights because the power of sovereign state governments would prevent them.
"Deprived of comfort", is that the new military euphemism for "tortured"? I'm finding it hard to keep up, but then I've been lost ever since "collateral damage".
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
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.
No, don't be silly... they just took away their high thread-count sheets and artisan olive oils, and forced them to drink -- shudder! -- domestic beer.
That's all... it certainly wasn't the case that people at the top of the US Government knew exactly what was going on at prisons such as Abu Ghraib, and in fact ordered it, no matter what you may have heard from dozens of soldiers who were actually there.
Could you imagine the implications if they had to turn this data over? Every minor study in the country would be trolling Google for user information.
And developers would probably write their own P2P web search engines. Napster did the keyword search for mp3 files. It would be trivial to modify this for web page searches - each filename would be replaced by a keyword string, while spider searches would be implemented through distributed processing.
If the Feds really want to find a list of IP addresses looking for a particular keyword string, all they have to do is set up a webpage with these keywords in it. For registered advertisers, google provides webpage owners to retrieve list of IP addresses and the matching keywords that made a hit to that site.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
That's not really true. The corporations pretty much control the govt. If a corporation wants something (say some oil wells in Iraq) it simply has the govt do it for them.
Since corporations can buy and sell senators at will they have all the power the govt has and more.
evil is as evil does
Hey if the DoJ wanted to obtain information about google, why didn't they just google for it? This really should have been the response to the initial request.
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".
You forgot the obvious "but IANAL". There is lots of legal basis for requiring Google to hand out data when there's no criminal investigation going on. In fact, there's an entire section of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that deals with obtaining information during a civil suit from someone who isn't a party to the suit. It happens all the time, and it's supposed to be possible.
You can argue until the cows come home whether or not the DoJ needed the specific information they asked for, but the fact is that there is a legal basis for the decision, and under the FRCP, Judge Ware seems to have made a reasonable decision.
I also don't know where you got your impression that a military tribunal is better than a civil court. Why not then substitute all courts in the U.S. by military tribunals? What would you prefer: A court where you can choose your own defender, where you can appeal in case some mistake is made by the court, where the judges are independent from the government, and where the trial is public vs. an "enemy" officer as defendent, very limited and obscure ways to appeal if any, enemy officers as judges whose comrades you might have killed, and a secret trial in some military camp where nobody you know is allowed to attend? Do you really want to rely for justice on some TV-like bold gentlemen officers with balls of steel who have to act against the will of your warmongering commander-in-chief and compromise the former decisions of your comrades to displace and detain you for years? Good Luck.
I agree that the treatment by the U.S. military in general is not as bad how the terrorits treat U.S. soldiers or civilians, but that can not be used as an excuse to lower own standards. If you do lower the standards, you are not better than the terrorists.
You probably are not aware how Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have discredited the U.S. in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. You are no longer seen as The Good Guys (TM). For many Muslims you are now the bad guys, but for your friends you are now the Guys Who Don't Stick To Own Rules and give a fscking shit about the rules of the rest of the world.
You had the compassion and support of the world after 9/11, but you screwed up big time. Now the world looks at the U.S. troops in Iraq with a mixture of uneasiness and malicous joy, and even your best friends are investigating crimes the CIA committed in their countries or against some their citizen.
What a stupid waste of money and lifetime. The U.S. has the most talented people in politcial and social sciences, the greatest spin doctors, economical talent, the largest secret agencies, the greatest movie makers and military power that matches the power of the combined power of military in the rest of the world, but all this seems to be worthless and even counterproductive with an administration like the current one: The reputation in world ruined, terrorism in the world flourishing, the national deficit spiralling out of control, boosting national debt to historic dimensions, and an economy based on plundering and wasting irreplaceable natural resources of the world.
I hope the U.S. will manage to turn around 180 as soon as possible, but the whole world already will have to cope for decades with all the political, economical, environmental and social damage the U.S. have caused since the end of the cold war. The tragedy is that much of the damage done will turn out to be unrecoverable, but the sooner it starts, the better. Close Guantanamo today, and send the people there home. You will not be able to try them anyway, because all the evidence gained there will not be accepted in any court that respects the human rights.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
The first case is that the DOJ is just too used to supeonaing records that they don't understand they don't have to supeona google, just plug in a PC and go to town. It could be typical Govt. power-mongering. Unless...
Unless they are after something specifically to use at a later date in a criminal matter. One of the purposes of the orginal law was outlawing "allowing" minors to access porongrphic material. That's a huge scope for something like Google. That's the only reason for the manner they are using to get this info. The DOJ must have in their list of searches/IPs/Websites some idea which ones were entered by schoolchildren or pedophillies and want to cast the net and see just how far it goes. Are they after some kids seach that 245,786 items down has a porn site? That's the only reason I can see. Maybe they are trying to show all these search engines were "flagrantly" breaking the law. If they had search terms say lots of school children enter, they they could just enter the terms themselves and look for people trying to "trick" google into access to Kids. They had some idea of sites they'd shut down for illegal activity, they could still search Google's cache without a supeona. Unless they're after the IPs of Who searched for the illegal web sites. The whole thing stinks, and it looks like they want to use Google as "big brother" to do their law enforcement for them.
No they don't. Look at your statements: the individual *items* purchased are not listed. Only the merchant name (and perhaps address) is, along with the transaction price, of course.
CC companies do not, in fact, know what specific items you are purchasing (at least not yet). Guesses can be made based on the merchant (e.g. "Big Al's Sex Toy Shop - Atlanta, GA" might tell the CC company a bit about your sex habits), but they won't know that you purchased a black, 24" triple-ended model from RubberCo...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?