First, the government started eavesdropping on domestic phone calls without judicial approval, in the name of fighting terrorism. Now, federal officials want to rummage through the records of Internet search engines in the cause of battling pornography – just for research.
These intrusive efforts show how far the Bush administration will go to stretch government power into private lives.
What’s next? Hunting through library records to find out who’s reading a how-to book by Martha Stewart? (Oh, sorry – that’s the Patriot Act.)
All kidding aside, the Bush administration’s attempt to get its hands on Internet records is all too real. The Justice Department this week asked a federal court in California to force Google to turn over lists of search terms typed in by Google users and of websites reached through searches.
The feds last year asked Google – and Yahoo, America Online and MSN – for such data. Everybody quietly caved in except Google, which is challenging the subpoena as “overbroad, unduly burdensome, vague and intended to harass.”
It isn’t as if the government is looking for criminal conduct. Authorities aren’t doing a criminal investigation at all, nor is it asking for data that could directly identify individual search engine users.
It’s supposedly trying to do legal research. A 1998 law, the Child Online Protection Act, sought to penalize website operators whose content could be deemed harmful to children. The U.S. Supreme Court put the law on ice and ordered a federal court in Philadelphia to hold a full trial.
Opponents of the law argue that it puts an undue burden on people who are providing content legally and that filtering software is a more appropriate way to protect kids. (Pornography depicting children is not at issue here – it’s already illegal.) The Justice Department says filtering software won’t do the job, and it hopes to use the data from search engine companies to prove that point.
Two things are at issue here. The first is the law. We believe it is overbroad and could abridge free-speech rights. Controlling children’s access to indecent material is a parental responsibility, aided by technology such as software filters.
Second, government fishing in Internet databases is a dangerous precedent. If the Justice Department is looking at search terms now, what’s next?
