Acidus wrote:

Now for the really scary part of this. I have read the above paragraph countless times before. The only difference is back then it said China instead of the government and people instead of minors. Why don't you congressional ass clowns try to "understand the behavior" of my right to privacy or the term of illegal search and seizure!

[ Boy. Histrionics all around.

A) It's not congress, it's DoJ, so while you can certainly write your congressperson and tell them you'd like them to rein in Justice, you can't really blame them for this. Unless you're making a reference to the Child Online Protection Act, which is another story.

B) I could give a shit if the government or anyone else gets a list of things entered into the google search bar. They can even have graphs of frequency for all I care. What they can't have without a warrant is a way to tie any of that back to me. That means no IP address just as much as it means no names, and for that matter, i don't even think they should get locations/states. So I *am* concerned over the request for IP addresses. Arguing that IP addresses don't constitute "personal information" is disingenuous at best, so they can fuck off on that one. But the raw query strings themselves? Not so much a problem for me. That being said, I don't think that list, or the statistics that fall out of it, will really do them any *good* without the location data, which is the real reason the request is retarded.

In all honesty, I have a much bigger problem with all of this, which is that it reflects the DoJ's stated goal of spending a lot of time and effort on prosecuting pornographers. Ashcroft got the ball rolling, and then Acosta and Gonzales forthrightly declared this to be a priority. They've since proceeded to move against people under the revised Title 18 U.S.C. § 2257 law (requiring that anyone photographing a nude model acquire and retain from the model a signed statement that they're over 18, in essence).

There's an argument for § 2257, though I think it's mostly a thinly veiled attack on the entire industry, with little regard to actually protecting minors. The real problem is that Justice has been spending a lot of time going after "obscene" material, unrelated to child pornography. (see, for example http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=1145 and http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1125318960389). As that latter article indicates, going after material they know not to feature minors seems to be a tremendous waste of government resources that ought to be conducting investigations into corruption back home in Washington.

[EDIT]
I should have added that I understand fully the precendent-setting issues here, and so yes, Google did the right thing because even if this request was innocuous, later ones may not be. I really don't care who has this trivial data, but I should have followed up by saying, "unless it leads to requests for nontrivial data".

There's a pretty full analysis here : http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060119-060352

k wrote:

[ Boy. Histrionics all around.

A) It's not congress, it's DoJ, so while you can certainly write your congressperson and tell them you'd like them to rein in Justice, you can't really blame them for this. Unless you're making a reference to the Child Online Protection Act, which is another story.

B) I could give a shit if the government or anyone else gets a list of things entered into the google search bar. They can even have graphs of frequency for all I care. What they can't have without a warrant is a way to tie any of that back to me. That means no IP address just as much as it means no names, and for that matter, i don't even think they should get locations/states. So I *am* concerned over the request for IP addresses. Arguing that IP addresses don't constitute "personal information" is disingenuous at best, so they can fuck off on that one. But the raw query strings themselves? Not so much a problem for me. That being said, I don't think that list, or the statistics that fall out of it, will really do them any *good* without the location data, which is the real reason the request is retarded.

In all honesty, I have a much bigger problem with all of this, which is that it reflects the DoJ's stated goal of spending a lot of time and effort on prosecuting pornographers. Ashcroft got the ball rolling, and then Acosta and Gonzales forthrightly declared this to be a priority. They've since proceeded to move against people under the revised Title 18 U.S.C. § 2257 law (requiring that anyone photographing a nude model acquire and retain from the model a signed statement that they're over 18, in essence).

There's an argument for § 2257, though I think it's mostly a thinly veiled attack on the entire industry, with little regard to actually protecting minors. The real problem is that Justice has been spending a lot of time going after "obscene" material, unrelated to child pornography. (see, for example http://www.traditionalvalues.org/modules.php?sid=1145 and http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1125318960389). As that latter article indicates, going after material they know not to feature minors seems to be a tremendous waste of government resources that ought to be conducting investigations into corruption back home in Washington.

[EDIT]
I should have added that I understand fully the precendent-setting issues here, and so yes, Google did the right thing because even if this request was innocuous, later ones may not be. I really don't care who has this trivial data, but I should have followed up by saying, "unless it leads to requests for nontrivial data".

There's a pretty full analysis here : http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060119-060352

The points you raise are good ones but completely secondary to what I thought I made clear. There is nothing "trival" or "innocuous" about this. Frankly I don't care that the search data isn't associated with an IP. The government wants the intellectual property (ie the search strings) of a private company and is suing them for not turning it over. Unless there is some kind of "contempt of congress" thing going on I am disgusted by this.

On a side note Kerry, last time I checked I don't dismiss your opinions with a simple "whatever" or accusations of being a drama queen.

UPDATE: Changed my wording. I meant to say that Google is private company. It obviously is a publically held company

Acidus wrote:

The points you raise are good ones but completely secondary to what I thought I made clear. There is nothing "trival" or "innocuous" about this. Frankly I don't care that the search data isn't associated with an IP. The government wants the intellectual property (ie the search strings) of a privately held company and is suing them for not turning it over. Unless there is some kind of "contempt of congress" thing going on I am disgusted by this.

On a side note Kerry, last time I checked I don't dismiss your opinions with a simple "whatever" or accusations of being a drama queen.

[ Apologies if i was overly glib. The "whatever" in response to your post on cringley was in reference to your "gold star" ranking, which I think was undeserved, and which I tried to go on and explain. I didn't mean it as an indictment of your intellect, and I don't think it was exceedingly dismissive when followed by a relatively long post. Still, I apologize and will try to avoid that offence in future replies.

As for this post, I truly wasn't targeting the "histrionics" comment individually... everyone on the whole internet has been all worked up about this, on both sides of the political spectrum, and I think everyone is being somewhat excessive about it. Again, perhaps I ought to have been clear about that, but I honestly didn't consider it to be a personal attack.

Now as far as my reply expressing "secondary" issues, the post i replied to didn't say anything about intellectual property, but discussed the privacy implications... Here are your specific words from the top of the thread :

They did what now! How many of you want anything you have ever typed into Google to be in the government's hands? How many of you are pissed that other search engines just said "Here!"

...

Now for the really scary part of this. I have read the above paragraph countless times before. The only difference is back then it said China instead of the government and people instead of minors. Why don't you congressional ass clowns try to "understand the behavior" of my right to privacy or the term of illegal search and seizure!

My response was meant to indicate that I don't believe this case shows a massive violation of privacy, but has the potential to set bad precedent for future violations, and then continued to discuss what I see as the wider context, which is of greater concern to me. Granted, the discussion of the broader anti-porn crusade was not "on topic" in regards to your post, but I don't think it negates what it says above.

As it happens, I find the intellectual property discussion (e.g. the searches entered by users being treated as a proprietary data by Google) interesting too. Google is a giant corporation which, as part and parcel of it's business maintains vast stores of data regarding the activities and dispositions of tens of millions of inter... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Decius wrote:

an. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc., the most-used Internet search engine, was sued by the Justice Department after it refused to turn over information that may help the government monitor sexually explicit material on the Web.

The Justice Department said it asked for all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses in the company's database. According to the lawsuit, other search engines have complied with similar requests, ``and have not reported that they encountered any difficulty or burden in doing so.''

They did what now! How many of you want anything you have ever typed into Google to be in the government's hands? How many of you are pissed that other search engines just said "Here!"

Dude... no more altavista video pron searches :(

Decius wrote:

They did what now! How many of you want anything you have ever typed into Google to be in the government's hands? How many of you are pissed that other search engines just said "Here!"

There are other search engines than Mother Google? How would I find such a thing? Why would I?