U.S. Government Wants Google Search Records 917
JimBridgerBowl writes "According to the San Jose Mercury News, The Bush administration wants access to Google's huge database of search queries submitted by users to track how often pornography is returned in results. This information would be used for Bush's appeal of the 2004 COPA law, targeted to prevent access to pornography by children. The law was struck down because it would have restricted adults access to legal pornography. Google is promising to fight the release of this information." From the article: "The Supreme Court invited the government to either come up with a less drastic version of the law or go to trial to prove that the statute does not violate the First Amendment and is the only viable way to combat child porn. As a result, government lawyers said in court papers they are developing a defense of the 1998 law based on the argument that it is far more effective than software filters in protecting children from porn."
"1998 Law" (Score:1, Informative)
Don't forget who signed COPA into law (Score:5, Informative)
Seems Like There Are Simpler Ways.... (Score:3, Informative)
Google pr0n queries?? Probably take the worlds fastest super computer a year to parse!
Just Like The NSA Wiretaps (Score:2, Informative)
For example, they could ask for the percentage of searches that returned results with adult material that got clicked on.
The fact that they're looking for raw data clearly indicates that they want to do something with it that they'd prefer others to not watch - which, incidentally, is the only reason that fits for why they decided to evade judicial oversight of domestic wiretaps [blueworksbetter.com].
Re:If there were no logs of searches... (Score:1, Informative)
Of course you need search logs to improve search results.
I worked in my university department on AI algorhythms to improve
search engine performance. We certainly didnt need logs to improve
any monetary income. Based on what generally and currently gets
typed as a query and wich results are in the end taken as good
results by the user, software reranks, reindexes and reevalues
their databases and thus improves future result sets for same
queries. It's as easy as that.
Analee Newitz covers this kind of thing (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Keep anonymous logs (Score:5, Informative)
Bad Idea!
A brute attack is trivial here. There are 2^32 IP addresses so building a complete inverse mapping for this data can be done on an ordinary PC in no time.
Google Search: IMPEACH BUSH (Score:1, Informative)
What about Yahoo, Microsoft, Altavista, Hotbot, etc. - every other possible internet search tool?
Besides- you don't exactly need a search engine to find www.sex.com or
http://www.booble.com/ [booble.com]
Will the Republicans now go on a witch hunt for other heritic ideas, such as: Evolution and Free Thought?
In Soviet Amerika, Bush indexes You!
Re:Don't forget who signed COPA into law (Score:3, Informative)
Right. All Clinton wanted to do was crush the life out of the hugely growing, vital thing that is the web - all so that he could look good protecting The Children with a completely useless law that would only impact legitimate site operators anyway. You're really going to let Clinton of the hook on this? Any administration is going to feel obligated to push the envelope on controlling what can kids see/do/get drawn into. In this case, Clinton's administration pushed first. It's a bad law, and was from the beginning. Asking Google for stats to illustrate whether it IS or not may actually be a good thing, in that it will show the futility of prior restraint in communcations (something that should have been obvious to Reno originally, but oddly wasn't).
Re:I see a couple of flaws. (Score:3, Informative)
Not an idle worry. Peter Townsend of The Who spent 5 years on a registry of sex offenders for just exactly this. Took some fancy lawyering to keep him from being formally charged, too.
Inaccurate info, cookie expires at end of session (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The solution is obvious! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, it occurs to me that if they are going to be reading searches, we could send them messages directly, like "Chelsea is hotter than the Bush twins". How about "Hey Mr President stop looking over my shoulder at my porn" [google.com]
It's official (Score:3, Informative)
Gonzales v. Google Inc
bloomberg [bloomberg.com]
Re:The solution is obvious! (Score:3, Informative)