Department of Justice vs. Google vs. You and Me
cn | 21 January, 2006 11:42The Department of Justice wants to know...everything...about...you.
There's been a roaring buzz about the DoJ demanding that Google turn over 1 million records of searches. Yahoo, AOL, and MSN have already complied. The stated purpose of the demand is to analyze the effectiveness of the Child Online Protection Act, but every time private companies bend to the will of the gluttonous government we take a step closer to full oppressive monitoring of everything we do and everywhere we go.
There's a ton of great discussion out there about this specific issue and I've tried to capture my favorites here (I've added bold to the best parts of the quotes I've pulled):
From SiliconValley.com:
If you don't regularly anonymize your Google cookie and purge your personalized search history, now might be a good time to start (then again, in this day and age, why bother?). The Department of Justice on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order Google to comply with a subpoena issued last year for search records stored in its databases. The DOJ argues that the information it has requested, which includes one million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from a one-week period, is essential to its upcoming defense of the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (think of the children!). Google has so far refused to comply with the subpoena, saying the release of such information would violate the privacy of its users. "Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,'' Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, told The Mercury News. "[We plan to fight the government's effort] "vigorously.''
From boingboing.net (this post has a great clip in it):
In light of today's SJ Merc report that the Department of Justice has demanded user search records from Google, this excerpt from John Battelle's The Search seems worth reading again:As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.LinkThat bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlaw- ful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of privacy and freedom.
That’s a pretty large helping of trust we’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person’s head hurt.
From SearchEngineWatch.com:
In particular, the Bush administration wanted one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a one week period. The government apparently wants to estimate how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do.
Here's a thought. If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.
Getting a list of all searches in one week definitely would let US federal government dig deep into the long tail of porn searches. But then again, the sheer amount of data would be overwhelming. Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you're going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you'd get? Oh, and be sure you filter out all the automated queries coming in from rank checking tools, while you're add it. They won't skew the data at all, nope.
Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not. In the end, you've asked for a lot of data that's not really going to help you estimate anything at all.
Far better would be to do some searches that you think children and teens are actually doing, such as by doing a survey of them. Then just go start searching on Google and the other search engines yourselves. See what actually comes up, especially when the filtering protection each service offers is enabled. That would give you plenty of data, plus it would be useful for everyone to have someone rigorously test the filtering systems that are offered. Serving subpoenas to get the data isn't necessary.
It's important to note that from what I read, the requests do not involve user data at all. Shutting off your cookies or purging your personalized search data wouldn't protect you with this request, because the request wasn't going after personal data. To stress again:
- According to the report, they wanted a list of one million web addresses. Not who went to the web pages and when, just a list of URLs picked randomly.
- They wanted searches for one week. I haven't seen the court documents, but I'm guessing Google could have handed over a list of searches that were entirely unassociated with IP addresses, times, cookies and registration information. Nothing suggests that they wanted to know who did the searches in any way.
Having said this, such a move absolutely should breed some paranoia. They didn't ask for data this time, but next time, they might. Of course, it bears reminding that this type of data is easily obtainable from ISPs. So even if the search engines refuse to comply, your own ISP could be giving up your data -- or selling it.
Again from SearchEngineWatch.com - a follow up, thought out and intellectual:
In short, gathering this data is worse than a fishing expedition. It's a futile exercise that will proof absolutely nothing about the presence of HTMs in search results. All it proves so far is that the DOJ lawyers (and apparently their experts) haven't a clue about how search engines work. An actual search expert will tear apart whatever "proof" they think they can concoct from the data gathered so far.As I said yesterday, a far better way to measure HTMs in SERPs (that stands for search engine results pages. I don't like the acronym, rarely use it, but let's play dueling acronyms today) to do this is to conduct some actual searches. That's what the US Government Accounting Office did when it wanted to measure porn in image search results.
Now let me bring this back to the bigger issue, that of trust. AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo DID NOT VIOLATE THE PRIVACY of any user by handing over this information. No private data was revealed. Nevertheless, by not pushing back against such a bad request for data, it leaves open the real fear that they might not push back if the US government decided to go on a real fishing expedition in the future. Privacy may not have been lost but trust was.
Picture this scenario. The US government wants to pass a new law on monitoring terrorists. In order to see the presence of searchers seeking out TOMs (that's Terrorist Oriented Materials) through search results, they ask each search engine to hand over an entire week's worth of search data completely with cookie info, IP addresses and registration information.
The purpose? They need to study how many people are seeking TOMs to have stats to support the law they want to pass. This is pretty much the same argument they are using in the current case, by the way.
Why shouldn't the search engines comply? Isn't it supporting terrorism by not helping?
No. There's a difference in reacting to help the law, according to laws, and being asked to participate in a police state. Consider this metaphor. Many people take part in Neighborhood Watch programs, to help better ensure the safety of their neighborhoods. It's a good idea, by and large. I don't recall there being that much controversy over such programs.
Now let's say the government decides that to better protect your neighborhood, they'll be placing cameras inside of everyone's home. What's the problem? I mean, unless you're doing something wrong, you don't have anything to fear, right?
The problem is -- speaking as a US citizen here -- that America was founded the principle of liberty. Stay out of my life, unless I'm doing something harmful to others. And if you think I'm doing something harmful, then use the carefully constructed and regulated laws to stop me from doing harm. Don't suspect everyone, monitor everyone and assume everyone is guilty. That's not how the country is supposed to work.
One more metaphor, which may better bring it home. Terrorists use telephones. Perhaps the government should go to the telephone companies and ask them to forward a week's worth of telephone calls, so they could determine how terrorists use the phone system. Anyone have a problem with that?
It's amazing how quickly - seemingly all of a sudden - our privacy
and individual rights and liberties are being quashed with such little
resistance...
Posted in
Ethics, Legal, Politics .
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