Feds Block EFF Look at Google/DoJ Contacts 79
netbuzz writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to know all there is to know about contacts between Google and a Justice Department official involved in a highly charged 2006 government-snooping dispute that ensnared the search giant. That DoJ official, Jane Horvath, was subsequently hired by Google last year as senior privacy counsel. The DoJ has refused for six months to release public information about the matter being requested by EFF."
Where's the Article? (Score:3, Informative)
Enquiring minds wanna know!
Re:Where's the Article? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/25435 [networkworld.com]
Re:Where's the Article? (Score:3, Informative)
Do no evil... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:5th Ammendment? (Score:5, Informative)
In cases of the 5th amendment, you can obviously call upon it when you have something to hide. You can also invoke it on principle to the fact that what I am NOT telling you has no relevance to the case at hand.
Imagine you are walking along the street and decide to rob a store. You bust into the store, start helping yourself to whatever, and you notice the store keeper being beat and raped. You call it in, it comes to trial, and all of a sudden the defendants lawyer asks you what were you doing in the store after it was closed. Obviously, you were robbing the store, but REGARDLESS, that has NOTHING to do with the beating and raping of the store keeper. This is a perfect example of why you would plead the 5th.
Re:Where's the Article? (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot has added a URL field in the story submission form. (My guess is that this URL is intended for automated dupe checking.) This link gets displayed in the Firehose entry after the article.
It would appear it doesn't get displayed should the story get accepted. I guess the theory was that the editors would edit the link in. Something that, in practice, it would appear they frequently forget.
So that's my guess as to why it's missing in the article. It's not that CmdrTaco removed it, just that he forgot to add it to the story text.
Re:Privacy Goes Both Ways (Score:3, Informative)
For example Darleen Druyun was sentenced to prison in September 2004 [worldpoliticsreview.com] for showing favoritism to Boeing while she was a top Pentagon acquisitions official.
There may be nothing at all to see, but the right to privacy during the time she was employed by the DOJ does not exist.
Re:Do no evil... (Score:2, Informative)
Our corporate system encourages normal/good people to do "evil" things, systematically, and Google is no exception. Check out this film:
http://www.thecorporation.com/ [thecorporation.com]
It's a liberal diatribe (there are Michael Moore's bits in it), but I found many of the points very persuasive.
How do we tweak the system to limit corporate abuse while maintaining her economic efficiency?
Re:5th Amendment? (Score:3, Informative)
That aside, it's kind of hard to follow an airline's procedure when it isn't the airline's procedure. This would all be fine and dandy if it were a security service payed for by all of the airlines that service the terminal with agreed upon rules. Instead, we have a government agency paying for an outside security service proscribing, or at least pretending not to notice, arbitrary rules and procedures. The problem occurs before you even have a chance to interact with the company in question, so you never even have an opportunity to be contrary to their policies.
Anyway, I don't see how we arrived at thinking this is a 5th Amendment issue. The EFF has requested to see e-mail correspondence between Google and DoJ officials via the FOIA. This isn't a 5th Amendment issue because the EFF is seeking information pertinent to public officials carrying out the duties of their publicly accountable position. They have been met with silence for the past 6 months so now the EFF is suing so they can see what actually occurred during the period when the DoJ was seeking to subpoena Google for every single query entered into the search engine over a one-week period and the subsequent scale back to asking for only 5,000 random entries. The EFF wants to make sure that information from Google was not handed over to the DoJ illegitimately due to privacy concerns. They also want to make sure that Jane C. Horvath, the DoJ's Chief Privacy and Civil Liberties Officer at the time, is not giving information to the DoJ while now working as Google's Senior Privacy Counsel.