Bush administration lawyers have requested millions of search records from the top search engines in an effort to support their case for a child anti-porn law. But Google announced yesterday that it will fight the government subpoena, even though two other engines-Yahoo and MSN-have complied to some degree.
Federal prosecutors filed a request Wednesday in U.S. district court in San Jose, CA, to compel Google to agree to turn over a “random sampling” of one million search queries entered into Google during a single week, along with a sampling of a million Web sites from the Google index. That request was apparently made by subpoena issued in August 2005 to help amass data for reviving a law intended to shield children from online pornography.
Google refused to comply with the Justice Department request at the time and affirmed yesterday that it will continue to fight the government request. “Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,” Google associate general counsel Nicole Wong said in an e-mail statement.
Since August, Google has filed objections to the government subpoena on the grounds that providing the requested data would reveal trade secrets about Google’s search algorithm and expose personally identifiable data about users.
The DOJ lawsuit filed yesterday said that other search engines have already complied with similar requests and have not found them burdensome. Spokespersons for both Yahoo and MSN said those engines supplied U.S. attorneys with at least some of the search information they requested, in a form they said was “not personally identifiable”.
Yesterday’s suit claims that the Google information would give government lawyers ammunition to unblock enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998. Privacy advocates challenged the law on free-speech grounds soon after its enactment, and two appeals courts have upheld that challenge. In fighting the law, which would have penalized Web operators if children viewed adult content on their sites, watchdog groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union argued that Web filtering software could protect children just as well without impairing adult users’ constitutional rights.
The U.S. Supreme Court let the injunction stand in 2004, but added that it might take another look at the law if U.S. attorneys could provide more data showing that filters did not keep porn from kids.
The DOJ filing in California district court says that the Google search records requested would “assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users” and in gauging the effectiveness of software filters. Similarly, U.S. attorneys say they want the sample of Web sites indexed by Google to “understand the natur3 of the Web sites that users of search engines can find…[and] to determine the character of those Web sites.”
