Feds Seek Google Records in Porn Probe

[U2Girl1978]

SAN JOSE, Calif. - The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. for details on what its users have been looking for through its popular search engine.

Google has refused to comply with the subpoena, issued last year, for a broad range of material from its databases, including a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period, lawyers for the U.S. Justice Department said in papers filed Wednesday in federal court in San Jose.

Privacy advocates have been increasingly scrutinizing Google's practices as the company expands its offerings to include e-mail, driving directions, photo-sharing, instant messaging and Web journals.

Although Google pledges to protect personal information, the company's privacy policy says it complies with legal and government requests. Google also has no stated guidelines on how long it keeps data, leading critics to warn that retention is potentially forever given cheap storage costs.

The government contends it needs the data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches as part of an effort to revive an Internet child protection law that was struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court on free-speech grounds.

The 1998 Child Online Protection Act would have required adults to use access codes or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online, and it would have punished violators with fines up to $50,000 or jail time. The high court ruled that technology such as filtering software may better protect children.

The matter is now before a federal court in Pennsylvania, and the government wants the Google data to help argue that the law is more effective than software in protecting children from porn.

The Mountain View-based company told The San Jose Mercury News that it opposes releasing the information because it would violate the privacy rights of its users and would reveal company trade secrets.

Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, said the company will fight the government's efforts "vigorously."

"Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching," Wong said.

 

[financeguy]

The thing with porn should be to have it well regulated with consistently applied and clearly defined regulations and international co-operation among law enforcement to combat abuses.

The planned legal changes sound sensible enough to me.

 

[melon]

The planned legal changes sound sensible enough to me.

Not when you're dealing with a conservatives that have broad interpretations of obscenity. That's why they've run into trouble. Curbing adult expressions of speech due to a vague reason of "protecting the children" is unconstitutional, as courts have ruled repeatedly.

Melon

 

[indra]

I don't get why parents can't just watch their own damned children.

You don't want your kids looking at porn, they you make sure they don't. But don't take away someone else's rights because you don't want to bother being a parent.

 

[financeguy]

Not when you're dealing with a conservatives that have broad interpretations of obscenity. That's why they've run into trouble. Curbing adult expressions of speech due to a vague reason of "protecting the children" is unconstitutional, as courts have ruled repeatedly.

Melon

Point taken, but the reality of the porn industry is that it's worth billions per year, so Republicans, if they're wearing their sound business heads, presumably don't want to totally shut it down.

Think of the increase in the unemployment stats in a certain region of California.

 

[A_Wanderer]

It is not about protecting children, it is about putting the noose in place to restrict an "immoral and corrupting" industry.

User pays pornography combines sex and the free market, guess which one are they against?

Stopping children from viewing pornography is different from stopping child pornography.

 

[financeguy]

Stopping children from viewing pornography is different from stopping child pornography.

Yes but given the wide availability of the internet it is reasonable to have measures that make it more difficult for children to view pornography. Exposure to pornography at a young age could induce a degraded view of sexuality.

 

[indra]

Yes but given the wide availability of the internet it is reasonable to have measures that make it more difficult for children to view pornography. Exposure to pornography at a young age could induce a degraded view of sexuality.

Then the kids' parents should be paying attention and not using the internet to babysit their kids.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Any evidence for that other than anecdotal, have incidences of rape dramatically increased in countries where children have had access to the internet over the last decade? Do studies on attitudes towards sexuality show a detrimental effect since the advent of the internet?

A national system of age verification would be setting the stage for internet use to be checked on a database, it could very easily be augmented for abuse.

 

[financeguy]

Then the kids' parents should be paying attention and not using the internet to babysit their kids.

You really think that it's as simple as that? A 13 year old adolescent male, if he wants to find porn, will easily outwit his parents, not least because he probably knows a lot more about computers than they do.

I don't have kids but when and if I do I wouldn't want them looking at porn, at least until they're 16 or 17. And I don't want to be worrying over the fact that they might be because internet porn is not sufficiently regulated.

 

[VertigoGal]

Porn should be available to adults who want it, but I have to say that it's all over the place. I mean I didn't really need to see multiple pages of naked women in sexual and/or degrading poses when I was 11 years old. I wouldn't want my kids to see that at that age in the future. And pretty much all teenage guys look at porn starting pretty young, no matter what their parents think they are doing to stop it, trust me.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Regulation just would not work. If you lock browsers out of the box and force people to plug their "national ID card" number into google everytime they wanted porn then kids would just use p2p networks, or direct connect or go to a LAN and fileshare with their gigabit ethernet.

Having personal browsing of material checked on by the state is more frightening from an individual liberty perspective than the wiretaps of intercepted incoming AQ suspect phone calls.

 

[VertigoGal]

Regulation just would not work. If you lock browsers out of the box and force people to plug their "national ID card" number into google everytime they wanted porn then kids would just use p2p networks, or direct connect or go to a LAN and fileshare with their gigabit ethernet.

Having personal browsing of material checked on by the state is more frightening from an individual liberty perspective than the wiretaps of intercepted incoming AQ suspect phone calls.

I could be wrong but I think the US gov't can look at pretty much anything they want on the internet including emails and things...I couldn't back it up, but someone told me that they even have computers that filter through emails that have suspicious words or combinations of words, etc.

And regulation wouldn't stop the determined from finding porn, but it might help...sort of

 

[A_Wanderer]

I saw a few calculations, it would be mathematically impossible for an echelon system to function over all the internet, and thats ignoring the legal implications.

 

[yolland]

Any evidence for that other than anecdotal, have incidences of rape dramatically increased in countries where children have had access to the internet over the last decade? Do studies on attitudes towards sexuality show a detrimental effect since the advent of the internet?

I have the same question.

financeguy is right, though, about the ultimate unfeasibility of regulating what teenagers (boys especially?) will seek out, online or otherwise. And that's really the age group most of us parents are concerned about. I already know what my 7 year old's current phase of response to catching a glimpse of a naked female image is: he collapses into embarrassed giggles. Big deal. My real concern is, as he gets older and less embarrassed and more keenly interested (as he should, it's normal and healthy), might he be tempted to fall into a kind of compulsive reliance on the stuff as an (unhealthy) alternative to struggling through the alternately painful, confusing, humiliating and exhilarating struggle of slowly learning to integrate his sexuality with the other aspects of his social self, just like we all did as teenagers? That's my worry really, not that he'll become a rapist or a misogynist or whatever.

But like A_W, I just haven't seen the sociological or psychological data to clarify for me one way or the other whether access, in and of itself, makes these fears more likely to come true.

 

[VertigoGal]

I saw a few calculations, it would be mathematically impossible for an echelon system to function over all the internet, and thats ignoring the legal implications.

ah ok, I figured it was an exaggerated "Big Brother is protecting us" story.

Parents have a right to want to protect their teenage sons from it to some extent though for many of the same reasons they'd want them to stay away from alcohol or drugs or whatever...although any efforts to keep kids away from those two things are a joke anyway.

 

[I'm Ready]

alright I wrote a gigantic research paper on censorship

after looking at everything, if parents want to stop their children from watching porn, they have the technology to do it, and they are just being lazy by making the gov't do it for them

 

[Liesje]

Parents monitoring kids so that they're not exposed to porn is only ONE side though. At the same time, parents should be open with kids about sexuality so that when the kids ARE exposed to porn (b/c no matter how many filters you have or how little computer time you allow kids, they will at some point be exposed to porn), kids know how to react.

 

[Irvine511]

what scares me is that google has a database of pretty much whatever thoughts you have. i've used google to look up some pretty weird shit, out of curiosity, sometimes a morbid curiosity, and it seems a little bit of a dicey proposition for a government to, say, take all the terms i've searched on google and then try to connect the dots.

literally, google is reading your thoughts. and if the government, or perhaps worse, a corporation that's seeking to better market to you and at you, has access to such a database, just think of the consequences -- and, yes, this does tie into the patriot act.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Yes thats true, thats why you should always spoof your IP adress when using the search engine.

 

[Bono's shades]

I can just see someone getting investigated by the government because they were using Google to do research for a paper on human sexuality for a college course or something like that.

 

[Dreadsox]

Parents monitoring kids so that they're not exposed to porn is only ONE side though. At the same time, parents should be open with kids about sexuality so that when the kids ARE exposed to porn (b/c no matter how many filters you have or how little computer time you allow kids, they will at some point be exposed to porn), kids know how to react.

 

[BonosSaint]

what scares me is that google has a database of pretty much whatever thoughts you have. i've used google to look up some pretty weird shit, out of curiosity, sometimes a morbid curiosity, and it seems a little bit of a dicey proposition for a government to, say, take all the terms i've searched on google and then try to connect the dots.

literally, google is reading your thoughts. and if the government, or perhaps worse, a corporation that's seeking to better market to you and at you, has access to such a database, just think of the consequences -- and, yes, this does tie into the patriot act.

Let's see: based on my recent searches, I guess I could be labeled an anarchist, a socialist, a pornographer, a right wing conservative, a democrat , a Muslim, a hypochondriac, avid Christian, avid anti-Christian, straight, gay,
necromancer, witch, pro defense, pro prosecution, Nascar (only once, I swear it and it was for somebody else), a fan of the Mamas and the Papas (true) a reader of various and sundry (and sometimes bizarre) literature and someone who repeatedly googles the Constitution.

Irvine, they're not going to know what to make of us. We're the worst kind of subversive.

 

[Headache in a Suitcase]

whew... thank god i use yahoo to look for porn.

 

[MsGiggles]

if parents want to stop their children from watching porn, they have the technology to do it, and they are just being lazy by making the gov't do it for them

not true - you get porn sites for googling scooby doo.....

 

[Irvine511]

whew... thank god i use yahoo to look for porn.

note to self ...

 

[Irvine511]

Yes thats true, thats why you should always spoof your IP adress when using the search engine.

explain how.

 

[YellowKite]

Interesting side note - the two guys who started Google both worked for the National Security Agency. Yeah - the NSA - the current bad boys of spy scandal, warrent less monitoring on behalf of Dubya.

 

[trevster2k]

They tried to put all porn into a .xxx domain so they could have it all in the one spot and hopefully make it easier to manage. The US didn't like the idea and blocked it from happening. You will never stop all the porn from leaking out but putting most of it in a virtual red-light district would certainly help.


From wired.com

"Around 300 top-level domains are running on the net. But when ICANN decided to carve out a new one for adult content, a Christian group called the Family Research Council saw red, predicting the move would double the amount of smut available online, and, in the words of council attorney Patrick Trueman, "the porn industry would become twice the menace it is today."

When conservative groups start using the word "menace," look out. Prompted by a flood of mail from the Republican base, Michael Gallagher, assistant secretary at the U.S. Commerce Department, drafted a letter to ICANN chairman Vint Cerf asking for the new domain to be delayed. It was, and in that moment any illusion that the internet's critical domain-name system was immune from U.S. political whims evaporated.

Gallagher's meddling in what was supposed to be a technical decision by an impartial body added fuel to an international diplomatic rebellion against the United States' unique role in internet stewardship, and an ill-conceived proposal to put the net under multilateral control was narrowly curbed on the eve of a U.N. summit in November. But it's a small price to pay to keep smut peddlers in their place -- or, really, out of their place. In any case, the Family Research Council has moved onto other menaces, like gay marriage and the threatening practice of retailers saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas.""


According to the Justice Department, Yahoo, MSN, and AOl have already complied so Headache, they know about your rubber fetish.

 

[Liesje]

It's funny to think of what I would be labelled based on Google searches. When I don't know how to spell a word, I type it in Google and usually it will say "Do you mean ----- ?". Or, if I read a word and don't know what it means, I type "definition:-------". I also use Google for Celcius/Fahrenheit conversions and basic calculations. I'm rarely ever searching for actual sources of information.