U.S. government goes to court to force company to hand over records
Michael Liedtke
Sun
SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration’s demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet’s leading search engine — a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools of the government.
Google has refused to comply with a White House subpoena first issued last summer, prompting U.S. Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales this week to ask a federal judge in San Jose for an order to force a handover of the records.
The government wants a list of all requests entered into Google’s search engine during an unspecified single week — a breakdown that could conceivably span tens of millions of queries. In addition, it seeks one million randomly selected Web addresses from various Google databases.
In court papers that the San Jose Mercury News reported on after seeing them Wednesday, the Bush administration depicts the information as vital in its effort to restore online child protection laws that have been struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Google competitor Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet’s second-most-used search engine, confirmed Thursday that it had complied with a similar government subpoena.
Although the government says it isn’t seeking any data that ties personal information to search requests, the subpoena still raises serious privacy concerns, experts said, especially considering recent revelations that the White House authorized eavesdropping on domestic civilian communications after the Sept. 11 attacks without court approval.
“Search engines now play such an important part in our daily lives that many people probably contact Google more often than they do their own mother,” said Thomas Burke, a San Francisco lawyer who has handled several prominent cases with privacy issues.
“Just as most people would be upset if the government wanted to know how much you called your mother and what you talked about, they should be upset about this, too.”
Microsoft Corp. MSN, the No. 3 search engine, declined to say whether it even received a similar subpoena.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006