« Psssst! Wanna buy some answers? | Main | Prof's warning rings true »
January 22, 2006
The White House -- nanny to the nation? Or, we're all Albanians now
The US Department of Justice has issued a subpoena demanding that Google turn over an entire week's worth of search logs. According to CNet's news.com, the DoJ wants the information to help it to establish how much pornography is available on the Internet. This is an attempt to figure out how to prevent kids from seeing things the Bush Administration and Congressional Republicans think they shouldn't see, as specified in the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which is being challenged in court by the ACLU.
There are a couple of issues here. No -- there are a truckload of issues here. But let's start with the most obvious ones.
If the Bush Administration wants to know how much pornography is out there, why doesn't it just sit a bunch of its spooks down at their computers and have them start searching for it? How is sifting through a week's worth of Google search strings going to make this task easier?
It would certainly be naive to assume, when surfing the net, that one is doing so anonymously and untrackably. But by and large, when you're Googling stuff, your assumption is not that Big Brother is looking over your shoulder.
The administration's fixation on pornography -- aside from being just plain unhealthy -- is most likely a cover for their wanting to keep tabs on people for any number of other reasons: keeping an eye on terrorism and left-wing politics, primarily. It's logical that they might want to monitor people's Web browsing habits, given that they already check up on the books you take out of the library (via the Patriot Act) and listen to your overseas phone calls (the infamous warrantless wiretaps). At a recent meeting between the President and some GOP Congressional leaders regarding renewal of the Patriot Act, Bush is said to have fumed, "The Constitution is just a piece of paper!" Apparently, Constitutional protections of free speech and privacy are less important than his inept efforts to keep track of what his enemies are doing. Richard Nixon would be proud!
I used to work for a large publishing company that produced a group of magazine database products accessible on-line (this was on CompuServe, before there was such a thing as a commodity ISP). We used to charge people $1.50 an article to read material from several hundred magazines, using what would now be called a search engine. The software that provided the service tracked its users very closely -- it kept a log of every search term they entered, how much time they spent logged in, and which articles they retrieved. We occasionally looked at the data using a "snoop" utility, to help customers who were having trouble getting what they needed out of the products. But we were extremely careful never to reveal to our customers the extent to which we could snoop them.
That's because people have a right to expect that searching for information on-line is not subject to surveillance. Whether you and I happen to be offended by what certain individuals are searching for is irrelevant. (This sounds hopelessly naive, I know -- but that doesn't make it less true.) The whole idea of the right to privacy, the 4th Amendment, and other protections against government intrusion into our lives, is that we, as a society, are willing to put up with a certain amount of harmful activity (including crime and terrorism) as the price we pay for having laws that provide fundamental protection for individuals.
What's even more disturbing is the Bush administration's likely next step: prosecuting individual citizens based on their having viewed illegal Web content (traceable by matching Google searches to the IP addresses of the computers that performed them).
Sitting at a Web browser, typing in a URL or clicking on a link, and looking at the text and images that appear on the screen (no matter how offensive they might be) is not, and cannot be construed as, a crime. It's like listening to a radio signal.
In some countries, listening to a radio signal is a crime -- I attended a gathering of Monthly Review readers some years ago, at which I listened to someone who'd spent a lot of time in eastern Europe discuss his experiences there. He mentioned that in Albania, it used to be illegal to listen to Greek radio stations coming in from across the border. Albanians could be arrested and jailed for the simple act of listening to the radio.
Loading a Web page -- assuming the content was created by someone else, and you're not paying them for it -- is exactly the same thing. If the Bush Administration makes this a crime, they're doing exactly what the Albanian government was doing when it banned Greek radio. Is this what we want?
Besides that, what does the DoJ think it's going to find, by looking through a week's worth of search requests? Surely they can't feign surprise that a lot of people are searching for Web content that caters to, shall we say, the more base aspects of human nature. Why is it necessary to spend taxpayers' money to confirm what we already know?
Posted by Urbie at January 22, 2006 08:13 AM