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 internet users. I think we really should pay close attention to how they (and other similar businesses) respond to private and public attempts to acquire those data.

I hope I haven't put anyone off... if I ever seem dismissive, it's probably careless, and I'll apologize if I feel I was wrong to do it. You clearly believe this is a serious enough issue to become impassioned about, so lets be as precise as possible while we carry out the discussion.

I'm still uncertain in regards to your comments about congress. I grant you that the law being utilized here was passed by congress, but the investigation, such as it is, is being carried out by the Department of Justice. Based on past statements, it's being prosecuted at the behest of Attorney General Gonzalez and FBI Director Mueller. Certainly there are members of congress who want to see this happen, but the immediate fault (in my opinion) lies with the AG's absurd crusade against indecency when there are a) actual child pornographers to find and b) national security issues which ought to take precedence.

On the topic of the data requests, I expect every corporation who holds personally identifiable data about me to be extremely careful about releasing it. I think there should be a generic requirement for all corporations to issue a press release any time they turn over large quantities of data to any third party. I'm less concerned with the fact that data is sometimes turned over than with the fact that it happens without anyone's knowledge. (This is my key issue with the wiretapping situation as well -- do what's necessary, yes, but let's have a record with a neutral body, say, the FISA court, at the very least.) I'm glad google decided to say something, if only because now we know it's going on. Knowing what the details are we can make decisions about the validity of the requests and have arguments, and sort it all out. I see this kind of forum as the future of public discourse, but it's all meaningless without some level of transparency. Let google decide what to do on the basis of what it's customers believe is correct... it's not really possible yet, but that's what I'd like to see. For now, those who think there's nothing to worry about can do nothing, those who are angry can exercise their activism. -k]

RE: DoJ sues Google for failing to turn over records!