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"What Do the Feds Really Want From Google?

Friday, January 20, 2006

By Ed Foster

The Justice Department points out that its demands (which initially
asked for all queries for a two-month period and a complete list of URLs
that could be located via Google) do not include any personal
information about the user. It only wishes to protect children from
obscene websites, and it believes Google's data will help it show that
software filters are not enough to protect the kids from porn. Who could
argue with that?

Well, the U.S. Supreme Court for one, which in 2004 barred enforcement
of COPA because, while the law was having no noticeable impact on child
pornography, it was clearly demonstrating "potential for extraordinary
harm and a serious chill upon protected speech." It sent the case back
to the lower court in Philadelphia, and it's there that the Justice
Department hopes to use the information from Google and other search
engines to argue against the ACLU for COPA's reinstatement.

Now, let's think about this a minute. When COPA was enacted, it was
widely predicted that it, like most legal attempts to define what is and
is not pornographic, would inevitably be overturned on First Amendment
grounds. And it was. Even if Google had cooperated as the other search
engines did, in the end the courts would still recognize that COPA is
blatantly unconstitutional. So why did the administration decide not
only to pursue a case it's not going to win, but demand more information
(two months of Google searches) than it could possibly digest?

Well, we each might have our own theories about that, but I believe that
protecting children from pornography is just the stalking horse here.
Any government that wants to exercise some control over what its
citizens can read on the Internet has got to start by exercising some
control over Google. If Google had acceded to the Justice Department's
original demands, imagine what additional requests for information might
have resulted once the government got to look over the data. "Oh, yes,
it's true we were interested primarily interested in pornography, but
we've noticed patterns that suggest possible terrorist communications ..."

What we can all understand, though, is that there is much at stake in
this case. In fighting over the constitutionality of COPA, the feds
shouldn't have any more rights to demand information from a non-involved
third party like Google than the ACLU does. And when it demanded that
information, Google shouldn't have been the only search engine that told
them no and stuck by it. If the government can get any information it
wants any time for any ill-defined purpose, far more than the privacy of
our search engine queries will be lost.