Bush vs Google: Place Your Bets
It appears that The Bush Administration hasn’t learned their lesson from their whole wire tapping fiasco. Apparently, as reported by The New York Times, the U.S. Government is going after Google for refusing to comply with a subpoena to turn over all search requests made during an unspecified week and 1 million randomly selected wed addresses from several Google databases.
Why does the government need this search information? They claim to believe that it is vital to the resurrection of the Child Online Protection Act of 1998. This act, which was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as unconstitutional, attempted to protect children from the evils of the internet by making it a crime to publish a website that was “harmful to minors”.
Wow, who would have thought that an act that robbed citizens of their right to Freedom of Speech would be seen as unconstitutional. I guess the government decided that since they failed at raping the country of a written freedom, they’d try their hand at an implied freedom.
This is the consequence of complying with their subpoena. The only thing that will be accomplished by this compliance is that U.S. Citizens with be stripped of their implied right to privacy. You have to wonder if the government really believes that viewing the private search queries of it’s citizens will allow them to accurately gauge whether or not children are being exposed to material that is “harmful to minors”. Even if it was found that, on any given day, 50 million individuals entered the keyword “Playboy” into the google search engine, it would be impossible to prove that those individuals weren’t of required age to view that material.
The bottom line is that the U.S. Government is going too far once again and muddling around with our right to privacy. I, for one, support Google in their fight against the subpoena. Stay strong Google!
posted by Christopher SchneseÂ
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