Google Avoids Surrendering Search Info 226
Mercury News has details of a San Francisco judge's decision that Google should give the DoJ some details on its search engine, but is not required to turn over records to the government. From the article: "McElvain emphasized the study would be more meaningful if it included search requests processed by Google, which by some estimates fields nearly half of all online queries in the United States. Ware concurred with the Justice Department on that point, writing in his order that 'the government's study may be significantly hampered if it did not have access to some information from the most often used search engine.' But Ware said the government didn't clearly explain why it needed a list of search requests to conduct its study, prompting him to conclude the Web site addresses would be adequate." Reaction to the news is available on the Google Blog.
Google bravely refuses the Bush Administration's (Score:3, Insightful)
But they roll over when the ChiCom dictatorship orders them to censor democracy.
Color me not impressed.
Why should they get anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Before you Sensationalists Get Riled Up (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't hold people without a trial.
It doesn't start a war without obvious cause.
It doesn't enrich the friends of the politicians.
Oooh.. Looky Looky! Look at that shiny thing over THERE.
What I don't understand is (Score:4, Insightful)
Plus this is from the Executive branch which doesn't even make the law.
Let Congress pursue this if it wants. It has the responsibilty of making the laws, not the president.
The Constitution gives the president authority over the military and cabinet; the power to grant pardons and make appointments. And thats about it. Not sure where the Executive is coming from with this crap.
Who cares if the Gov has access, Google has access (Score:1, Insightful)
From the horses mouth, "...ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail"
Re:good or bad it is none of their business (Score:5, Insightful)
The easy and obvious counterargument to the 'you have nothing to hide' line is to point out that it should not be required of a citizen to explain their daily actions on the basis that they look suspicious, as we each do a dozen things every day that could seem out of context to be nefarious or at least odd. The trick is to convince those who actually write this legislative crap.
Somebody ought to surveille every member of Congress for a week or so, and then e-mail them pointed questions about the footage (even if there is nothing untoward, innocuous actions can look suspicious, and of course that's the whole point), and then cc the footage and the questions to a local news outlet...that'd dampen the legislative hankering for citizen surveillance tout suite.
Re:Google bravely refuses the Bush Administration' (Score:2, Insightful)
Censoring but tagging upsets people. Upset people cause change in the long run when they take action to correct it one way or another. Either the regional rules will change, or people dodge the rules in various ways (such as an encryption/tech vs. communication law/network isolation/spy law arms race until somebody wins). It's far more subtle, though perhaps less satisfying than a "no-censorship or the highway" style standoff, and it's effective.
What's the difference between Google and the Gov't (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe you weren't aware, but corps only have the power that the government lets them have. The government is vastly more powerful than any coporate entity and has essentially unlimited resources. If you make a list of organzations to be wary of the government is _always_ at the top of the list. The only thing that holds them back is accountability to the people (I won't debate how well that works
Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go (Score:5, Insightful)
The private sector, at worst, sends you some junk mail and tries to sell you something. If they've processed their data correctly, then you probably are interested. The worst that can happen is that they don't process their data correctly and you get offers on stuff you're not interested in.
The government, on the other hand, can do a lot worse than send you some poorly-targeted advertisements. Being targeted as a potential terrorist can do tremendous damage to your life. You could lose your job, be incarcerated (without trial, incedentally), and possibly get your face blasted across the news.
Re:Awful just awful.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:good or bad it is none of their business (Score:3, Insightful)
How can this be against the constitution if no ones rights are being violated? The government is not seizing data, they are subpoenaing it - a legal process clearly within the framework of our legal system . The real question is whether or not the government has a genuine need for the data in support of its case.
Our general need of having privacy and not being exposed to the world is a natural one and must be protected at all costs.
Whose privacy is is being violated and who is being "exposed" by google turning over search terms that are not in any way linked to an individual or ip address? Never mind the fact that like it or not, there is no right to privacy in the consitution.
If google cared one iota for the rights of its users, it wouldn't be censoring the search results of Chinese users. I suspect that google's resistance to this subpoena is two-fold: they clearly don't like the general public to precisely how much information about our browsing habits they retain and secondly, they are probably (rightly) worried that the type of information the government wants could enable their competitors to have insight into how their algorithm works.
Re:Why should they get anything (Score:5, Insightful)
International concern? (Score:4, Insightful)
i.e. not just getting info on its own citizens but on those from abroad simply because they may have used Google.com as opposed to Google.fr
It would clearly mess up the stats for the research wouldn't it.
The Frustration of the New American Way (Score:5, Insightful)
When a party resists an overbroad subpoena, our legal process can be an effective check on such demands and be a protector of our users.
The checks and balances system has failed us completely. To resist an overbroad subpoena, one must have both incredible financial strength as well as incredible legal strength. Companies much smaller than Google don't have either -- and the courts seem to accept any growth in government strength as a new standard whenever a smaller company just gives in to government requests.
This country was founded on an idea that the Federal government was to be set up to promote the general welfare of the people -- not by making a police state nor a welfare state. The Federal government was here to protect the rights of the people by making sure that the individual states didn't trample on these rights. Beyond that, the Federal government was given a few BASIC powers over the people and the state -- very very basic powers.
National security was a power for the government in its ability to defend the borders and call up the militia to keep out intruders. National security was NOT about policing the citizens of the country, this was left to the individual states to decide what is criminal and what is acceptable.
I am very mad that the average citizen doesn't see what has happened. Instead of having a federal government with very limited powers -- which can't be controlled by any amount of money -- we have a federal government with unlimited powers controllable by the highest bidder. If the highest bidder has any reason to restrain government, they can do so with the right legal aid. Yet the common man (the minority of 1) -- the most important facet of a free system -- has no power to do anything but fall victim to the wants of the masses. If the masses are ignorant, the minority of 1 will find themselves without any rights because no one came to their aid.
This has nothing to do with money, mind you. This only has to do with a federal government that is no longer a servant but a master, and the belief of the citizens that they're still able to stop Leviathan through voting.
Re:What American has been incarcerated without tri (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go (Score:4, Insightful)
Your version of mal-intent by coroporations is one thing - they want to brainwash me into buying their products so their wallets become fatter. That doesn't even hold a candle to the mal-intent a government could achieve by possessing the same info.
Re:If google was smart... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Can't Troll the E-Water (Score:5, Insightful)
If the government demanded that you pay an extra 1000 USD in taxes even though there's no legal reason for them to ask for that, and if a judge then decided that 1000 is too much but that 500 is OK, would you also say that's reasonable? Of course not. There's no middle ground here - you either stick to the law or you don't. Sadly, in this case, neither the government nor the judge did; the former's not surprising, of course, but the latter is.
Just a REMINDER! ..WAKE UP!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"While Google is reacting to the government request by refusing and resisting, other "leading search engines" seem less eager to protect their users right to privacy.
It should be pointed out that:
* Yahoo,
* Microsoft and
* America Online
have all turned records over to The Bush administration."
Be very aware of this. Google is the only search engine who put up a fight on this issue! The other "leading" search engines willingly, without question, handed over all information asked for. Google in their glory avoided giving out information, the rest didn't even put up a fight. Your Google searches may be protected - for now - but the rest of your searches are now "safe" in the hands of the US Justice Department.
Re:The Frustration of the New American Way (Score:3, Insightful)
You have a gmail address. You use the services of these big companies. The consolidation of corporate America into a small OPEC-like coalition of PACs is what allowed the eradication of the Fairness Doctrine [bsalert.com] to go down in the 80s without even a whimper, the emasculation of journalists and political candidates, bringing about the scenario where the people don't feel they have much power to effect change or stand up for their rights. And ultimately, merely as a symptom of its submission to big business, your fixation with Government's negligence in protecting the rights of the people.
If you want to really fix things. You have to stop feeding the behemoths. Microsoft, Comcast, Google, Fox, Time-Warner, Sony, Wal-Mart, Clear Channel, etc. The bigger these companies become, the less chance any of us have of protecting our individual rights.
When you're dealing with small companies, you're dealing with people who are more in touch with their nature of their business, industry and their customers. When you deal with big corporations, it's a hyper-detached hierarchy of people whose primary concern has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with keeping their job. Google's decision to fight "for the privacy of their customers" is a load of bullshit. It was strictly a PR move. If Google really respected their customers' privacy, they wouldn't retain personal information indefinitely, so it is an inevitability that Google will eventually, completely compromise the trust and privacy of their clientele. The bigger the company becomes, the less authority anyone has with any conscience to "to the right thing." Look at history. You will not find a single example of any entity with market share or absolute power that didn't end up completely corrupted. Why people think that Google will be any different, or their surprise at the government's inconsistent motives, is a testimonial to how naive our society has become.
If you don't like the direction in which things are going, then don't feed the beast.
Re:What American has been incarcerated without tri (Score:3, Insightful)
People who engage in warfare against the US (or other signatory countries) and are not in the uniform of a nation that has subscribed to the Geneva Convention are not entitled to any of the protections agreed under that convention. If found under arms with terrorists then they too are considered terrorists until such time as the Government determines what they wish to do with them. They are to be treated humanely in US prisons - and yes, I know some were not treated so in Abu Ghareb - those who mistreated them are being held responsible. Humane treatment does not mean they may not be deprived of comfort in an effort to coerce them into divulging information of intelligence value.
Military tribunals are authorized by the US Constitution. Military officers are college educated with multiple graduate level educational opportunities after commissioning - they are knowledgeable of the environments and situations that detainees were captured under. If a jury is involved, military juries have the ability to question witnesses themselves (through the judge) and do not have to rely blindly strictly on which attorney has the greater gift of gab. Many people on learning how the military justice system works have come to believe that if one is innocent it's better to be tried by a military jury - and conversely if one professes to spend the rest of his life looking for the "real killer", then you'd probably want to be tried by a civilian jury.
Who is going to sue the other search engines? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be seriously upset if my search engine would give my personal data to just anybody who doesn't have the right to such data.
Re:What American has been incarcerated without tri (Score:2, Insightful)
No, don't be silly... they just took away their high thread-count sheets and artisan olive oils, and forced them to drink -- shudder! -- domestic beer.
That's all... it certainly wasn't the case that people at the top of the US Government knew exactly what was going on at prisons such as Abu Ghraib, and in fact ordered it, no matter what you may have heard from dozens of soldiers who were actually there.
Re:Before you Sensationalists Get Riled Up (Score:4, Insightful)
So because the information is anonymous, they have a right to mine corporate owned information to attempt to resurrect a series of laws that have been repeatedly found unconsitutional? You describe porn as if it were something illegal, a problem that they are reasonably working to eliminate. And the government shares your position I'm sure. But somehow the "they're just attacking pornography" argument doesn't sway me much. Pornography involves peoples' right to explore their sexuality as they see fit, including selling video or photographs of said sexuality for the means of making money and helping other people enjoy their sexuality. The government disagrees with this protected practice (shielded by case law), and is looking for a way to implement their standard wedge method to make it impractical since they can't make it illegal. They are doing so under the guise of protecting children. This demand for "random search data" whether it is anonymous or not, is entirely inappropriate and private corporations which have rights of their own, should not be at the disposal of the government to provide them with commercial information in order to further their attempts to override peoples' rights through misrepresented over-restrictive impracticality.
That would be like the government demanding that the credit card agencies turn over all of the charge records of a random sampling of 50,000 Americans so the government could better understand peoples' spending habits. What you've done by condoning such government abuses of power is essentially hand the government the right to "explore" all private information for the purpose of "research" so they can advance their legal agenda of chipping away at peoples' rights using the wedge method and by over-regulating businesses they don't like.
Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go (Score:3, Insightful)
Since corporations can buy and sell senators at will they have all the power the govt has and more.
Re:Plenty of legal basis (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the U.S. Government, the one that works for YOU,
telling you that it's ok to invade your privacy on a whim.
What's next? Door to door house searches to look for Vitamin C?
(The unapproved Flu medicine).
Re:What's the difference between Google and the Go (Score:3, Insightful)
The first case is that the DOJ is just too used to supeonaing records that they don't understand they don't have to supeona google, just plug in a PC and go to town. It could be typical Govt. power-mongering. Unless...
Unless they are after something specifically to use at a later date in a criminal matter. One of the purposes of the orginal law was outlawing "allowing" minors to access porongrphic material. That's a huge scope for something like Google. That's the only reason for the manner they are using to get this info. The DOJ must have in their list of searches/IPs/Websites some idea which ones were entered by schoolchildren or pedophillies and want to cast the net and see just how far it goes. Are they after some kids seach that 245,786 items down has a porn site? That's the only reason I can see. Maybe they are trying to show all these search engines were "flagrantly" breaking the law. If they had search terms say lots of school children enter, they they could just enter the terms themselves and look for people trying to "trick" google into access to Kids. They had some idea of sites they'd shut down for illegal activity, they could still search Google's cache without a supeona. Unless they're after the IPs of Who searched for the illegal web sites. The whole thing stinks, and it looks like they want to use Google as "big brother" to do their law enforcement for them.