Google Avoids Surrender

Google Avoids Surrendering Search Requests By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer In my opinion, as you will see below, this ruling is really important to our Democracy and the future freedom of all of us. If the Bush administration or any other future (hopefully Democrat) administration can monitor our private communications with others and also monitor our requests for information such as at libraries and, in this case, Internet search engines such as Google to determine our patriotism toward them - not necessarily the patriotism we should have to our fellow Americans -- then our Democracy and freedom is down the drain and the book "1984" is true - just a bit late! No 9/11 nor other catastrophe is worth paying that price! Many more Americans have sacrificed their lives for our freedoms than were lost in 9/11 when you consider Vietnam, Korea, and WWII the numbers are overwhelming. Just the American lives lost in Iraq not counting our sacrifices in Afghanistan, already outnumber those lost in New York by the terrorists! - and those poor souls thought they were defending their country because they were lied to by the President of the United States, their commander in chief! That is disgraceful and perhaps criminal! Could it be, that in this country which has been my family's home for over 350 years (about 130 years before the United States even existed), that I should live in fear of a knock on the door and grim faced men march me off to Guantanamo or one of their torture locations never ever to be seen again? It is not impossible. It has happened throughout the ages and especially in Germany in the 1930's - and in much the same ways we are seeing today. They weren't always Jews who were taken to the concentration camps. They were people who were a threat to the government. Now, is not the kind of thinking I express here on Upstream, a ‘threat' to the present government? Yet, under our system, it is healthy to criticize one's government and attempt to bring about change, peacefully, of course. Unfortunately, governments with all of their power - if not limited by the courts, tend to choose force to suppress their opposition - guess it is human nature to do whatever is in your power to do..... As you will see in the article below, that the government could have the Internet addresses of 5,000 people who used Google but NOT what we asked to search! Well, since "everyone" uses Google, that could mean almost anyone and certainly wouldn't be of any use to the government - like a list of who buys lettuce at the supermarket. What the government really wanted was a list of people who wanted to search for certain things (anti-Bush?) on Google! Ostensibly, they claimed they wanted statistics on Internet pornography which sounds laudable, except that all of us at one time or another have been curious and at least taken a peek - and it actually isn't THAT easy to find. My point is that I don't believe the government has an overwhelming interest in pornography but they are vitally interested in what we citizens think, who we communicate with and what we learn from Google in our searches which is contrary to what our government wants us to know. After all, if they were only interested in pornography statistics they wouldn't need to know who we are would they - unless they had other plans? ...AG SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge on Friday ordered Google Inc. to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government's demand for a list of people's search requests — potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect. In his 21-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the U.S. Justice Department with the addresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3. The government plans to use the data for a study in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration is trying to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography. [Sure they are....AG] Ware, though, decided Google won't have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights advocates. "We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring," Google lawyer Nicole Wong wrote on the company's Web site Friday night. "What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies." Attempts to reach a spokesman for the Justice Department late Friday weren't immediately successful. The government had asked for the contents of 5,000 randomly selected search requests, dramatically scaling back its initial demands after Google's vehement protests gained widespread attention. When the Justice Department first turned to Ware for help in January, the government wanted an entire week's worth of Google search requests — a list that would encompass queries posed by millions of people. [Can't win ‘em all, huh?, Georgie boy?... AG]