Google vs. Government

The Justice Department has decided to sue Google in response to Google's refusal to hand over a week's worth of search data, including the IP addresses of those who did the searching. Why has our government requested this information, you should ask? To gather data on a person's ability to find sexually explicit content online, and to use such data to defend it's beleaguered Child Online Privacy Protection Act, which has been successfully contended twice in lower courts and now faces a hearing in the Supreme Court.

So saith the Justice Department. However, if all they seek is to prove that online search engines can provide pornography to anyone with a free hand, why require the IP addresses? Those don't help in the government's declaired endeavors. Unless, of course, the government has other interests.

Truthfully, what government wouldn't want a map to every person who's downloaded child pornography, or to everyone who's read up on the Little Red Book, or who's been reading up on atomic energy, or how to grow your own Marijuana, or how to do any of the hundreds of things the government doesn't want you to know about. Well, with this handy research data in hand, we can place wiretaps on every flagged IP, making it sooo much easier for our dear Uncle to keep the baby eagles in the nest.

Apparently MSN, Yahoo, and AOL don't care quite so much about this possible abuse of power. ( Let's not get ahead of ourselves, after all. No one has done anything with the data yet. ) Thank you, Google, for caring. I may not do any of these things ( Well, I do like to read up on atomic energy from time to time ), but if I want to search the web for a picture of a man scratching his ass, I'd like it if that fact were not a matter of federal record. So long as you have my interests in heart, you'll have my trust.