Watch out what you Google for because the FEDS are now interested in Google’s
records. Fortunatley the company is prepared to fight in order to protect the
privacy of their users.

The Bush administration on Wednesday asked a federal judge to order
Google to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded
databases.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child
protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law
was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content
accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to
determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice
Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a
subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1
million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any
one-week period.

The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing
the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy
rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court
documents.

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here.

Kudos to Google for doing this. Now it is more important to protect privacy
than any other time when you look at how the government likes to snoop on its
citizens. Of all things going on in the country today, I would think Bush has
more important things to do than checking for porn searches. I understand they
are looking at searches minors could do and end up finding porn links but that
should be something the parents oversee not the government. I thought
Republicans were for smaller government?

Google has a very effective decency filter on their searches which you have
to turn off in order to see porn sites. Of course there are sites out there that
do slip through the system but that is not the fault of Google or its users but
rather the clever crafting of the porn industries programmers. Perhaps the
government should go after them. That is easier said than done since most of
those sites are located in other countries.