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Feds Block EFF Look at Google/DoJ Contacts
netbuzz writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to know all there is to know about contacts between Google and a Justice Department official involved in a highly charged 2006 government-snooping dispute that ensnared the search giant. That DoJ official, Jane Horvath, was subsequently hired by Google last year as senior privacy counsel. The DoJ has refused for six months to release public information about the matter being requested by EFF."
All I see is a link to some news article about Google hiring this DoJ person. Nothing at all to an article suggesting that the USDoJ is stonewalling EFF as suggested by the summary.
Enquiring minds wanna know!
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Unless it meas profit!
General, you are listening to a machine! Do the world a favor and don't act like one.
I honestly don't know about the case at hand, but invoking the 5th amendment is not saying you are guilty or not... similar to refusing to give a police officer your drivers license when you are walking to the store at 1AM, or not letting airport security boot up your laptop and look through it. They would like you to think that refusal is implication of some guilt, but when it comes down to it, what they are asking has nothing to do with the problem at hand. If I am walking down the street, there is NO reason to expect that I would even have a drivers license, let alone give it up when I AM NOT DRIVING. Same with airport security snooping in my laptop... I am not plugging my laptop into your plane, your servers, or anything that should concern you. It has nothing to do with people who have a bomb in their luggage.
In cases of the 5th amendment, you can obviously call upon it when you have something to hide. You can also invoke it on principle to the fact that what I am NOT telling you has no relevance to the case at hand.
Imagine you are walking along the street and decide to rob a store. You bust into the store, start helping yourself to whatever, and you notice the store keeper being beat and raped. You call it in, it comes to trial, and all of a sudden the defendants lawyer asks you what were you doing in the store after it was closed. Obviously, you were robbing the store, but REGARDLESS, that has NOTHING to do with the beating and raping of the store keeper. This is a perfect example of why you would plead the 5th.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
As a government employee she was subject to specific proscriptions in her behavior that are set up to prevent even the appearance of conflict of interest. Government ethics rules are quite extensive and if she was feeding information to Google while a DOJ employee would be subject to severe consequences.
For example Darleen Druyun was sentenced to prison in September 2004 for showing favoritism to Boeing while she was a top Pentagon acquisitions official.
There may be nothing at all to see, but the right to privacy during the time she was employed by the DOJ does not exist.
It is a service that can be revoked if you don't follow the operating companies' procedures.
That aside, it's kind of hard to follow an airline's procedure when it isn't the airline's procedure. This would all be fine and dandy if it were a security service payed for by all of the airlines that service the terminal with agreed upon rules. Instead, we have a government agency paying for an outside security service proscribing, or at least pretending not to notice, arbitrary rules and procedures. The problem occurs before you even have a chance to interact with the company in question, so you never even have an opportunity to be contrary to their policies.
Anyway, I don't see how we arrived at thinking this is a 5th Amendment issue. The EFF has requested to see e-mail correspondence between Google and DoJ officials via the FOIA. This isn't a 5th Amendment issue because the EFF is seeking information pertinent to public officials carrying out the duties of their publicly accountable position. They have been met with silence for the past 6 months so now the EFF is suing so they can see what actually occurred during the period when the DoJ was seeking to subpoena Google for every single query entered into the search engine over a one-week period and the subsequent scale back to asking for only 5,000 random entries. The EFF wants to make sure that information from Google was not handed over to the DoJ illegitimately due to privacy concerns. They also want to make sure that Jane C. Horvath, the DoJ's Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer at the time, is not giving information to the DoJ while now working as Google's Senior Privacy Counsel.