Feds Seek Google Records in Porn Probe

"SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - The Bush administration, seeking to revive an online pornography law struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, has subpoenaed Google Inc. (GOOG) 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."
MyWay

Well I asked in the comment of this blog, while discussing the administrations spying, how long before they would be tracking goggle searches. Now we know that they have in fact been doing just as I predicted. Don't believe the porn nonsense, that's just an excuse, they want the information for exactly the same reasons that they wanted to wiretap, to spy on you and me. This is the consequence of bringing down the wall that separated foreign intelligence and domestic police work. Now they can claim to be looking for something that no one would argue with, protecting children from pornography, but what they will really be doing is mining the data for information on you.