Short one today.
So it appears Google is battling with the Bush administration.
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.
So here we see the BA so concerned for the children that it wants to get all of Google’s database records, what terms were searched for as well as who searched for them, in order to see how many children have gotten access to pornography.
Granted, I don’t have any inside connections, I’m not best friends with any Washington officials, but isn’t the timing on this just a wee bit convenient? We’ve got these guys spying on everyone from suspected terrorists to peace protestors, most likely CNN’s Amanpour who’s as much of a terrorist as she is an ocean liner, and the author of an anti-Bush book being put on the “no fly list”. The scandal blows up and people know they’re being spied on, what do they do? Rip out a law from 1998 that was kicked down already to get every record from whenever they want from the biggest search engine in the world.
Just like he cried about terrorism before, he’s trying to plead to our “save the children” heartstrings to he can stomp all over our civil liberties again. This isn’t about pornography. Adult web sites have an age agreement on their front page and Google has a mature content filter that is on by default. This is about more invasion of our lives. I, for one, am incredibly happy that Google is fighting this one.
Next they’ll be asking nationwide ISPs to provide records of everywhere their users have been so they can “check where households with minors have surfed”. Anyone who believes this is really about pornography isn’t reading.
I don’t normally like to think Bush supporters are truly stupid, just they have different priorities, but the people who will believe what he says at face value in cases like this (and make no mistake, there will be droves of “concerned parents” or the AFA) just make me wonder how they graduated high school.
