Code is Law.

As Google's influence grows, a number of scholars and programmers have begun to argue that the company is acquiring too much power over our lives - invading our privacy, shaping our preferences, and controlling how we learn about and understand the world around us. To counter its pervasive effects, they are developing strategies to push back against Google, dilute its growing dominance of the information sphere, and make it more publicly accountable.

Some of the suggestions for fighting back are more practical than others, but taken together they represent an argument that "searching" is no longer a neutral tool, but has become a social force in itself - Google's hidden algorithms have the power to make or break reputations and fortunes, to shape public debates, and to change our view of the world.

The challenge is how to do this without undermining an online application that, even its critics concede, is one of the greatest learning and labor-saving devices of our time.

Two from last year:

Virgil Griffith, creator of Wikiscanner, announced LawScanner within two hours after Speaker Pelosi's declaration. The Register writes up the story: Code is Law, but Law is Sausage.

Mmmm, don't you just love the smell of PageRank in the morning?

War’s changing character is not only augmented by the emergence of the new media; the way the web and today’s communication devices are used to organize lives also instructs our understanding of how killing is organized. The argument put forward here is that the web’s emerging organizing principles — including a social as well as a technological dimension — increasingly govern the management of violence.

Also:

10: Indeed, drawing in part on the reasoning of Verdugo-Urquidez, as well as the Supreme Court's treatment of the destruction of property for the purposes of military necessity, our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.

Finally:

According to Sense Networks, all the location data that it gathers from mobile phones, GPS and Wi-Fi is completely anonymous so privacy should not be an issue.

Stopping Google