Uncle Sam wants you . . .
posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger
. . . to hand over your search records.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion in federal court seeking a court order that would compel search engine company Google, Inc. to turn over “a multi-stage random sample of one million URL’s” from Google’s database, and a computer file with “the text of each search string entered onto Google’s search engine over a one-week period (absent any information identifying the person who entered such query.”
The Complaint is available on the Findlaw site.
January 19, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Posted in: Privacy, Uncategorized
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Responses (2)
Simon - January 19, 2006 at 9:11 pm
On page four, they don’t request just “a multi-stage random sample of one million URL’s from Google’s database,” but even better: “an electronic file containing all URL’s [sic.] that are avaiable to be located through a query on your company’ [sic.] search engine.” Given that Google indexes the greater part of the web, giving the department of Justice that list would be far more effective than resisting it in court, since it would be roughly the equivalent of asking a computer to calculate the final digit of pi: even if it doesn’t crash the justice department, it’ll take them until the next administration to go through the list!
Josh - January 20, 2006 at 3:20 am
Very interesting (and disturbing) – thanks very much for the link to the complaint. I do hope one (or more) of the Concurring Opinions bloggers will post his thoughts on this latest action by DOJ–particularly on the legality of such a subpoena.
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