Judge To Hand Over Some Google Info

As the old song goes, Google is fighting the law and the law is winning. Though the official ruling and its extent are yet to be released, a federal judge indicated he would require Google to comply with at least part of the Dept. of Justice’s request for information.

U.S. District Judge James Ware’s partial judgment, as reported in several places, is expected to grant the DOJ access to a portion of Google’s massive index of websites. He indicated that he would not allow access to search terms for fear the public would view their search queries as “subject to government scrutiny.”

In January, the DOJ asked Ware to force Google’s compliance with a subpoena seeking search information for use in a study to bolster support for a law, tabled since 1998, intended to protect children from viewing pornography online.

Ware was persuaded to grant part of the DOJ’s request because of the government agency’s reducing its initial demand of 1 million random search queries and 1 million indexed websites to 50,000 URL’s and 1,000 search terms. Along with that, the DOJ had offered to compensate the search giant for up to a week of its programmers’ time.

Google, among competitors MSN, Yahoo!, and AOL, was the lone standout against the DOJ’s request. Google lawyers argued the request for Google’s privately held information was unnecessary from the start, using Alexa’s four-billion URL index as an example of Web analytics tools the government could use to get similar information.

One also might argue that the 1998 Child Online Protection Act and search engine subpoenas are both unnecessary, if the federal government hadn’t blocked the proposed .xxx domain, and required the relocating of pornographic sites (currently taking up 25% of the Internet) to that domain.

The ACLU joins critics of the Act the DOJ is looking to support, calling it a threat to civil liberties because of the subjective nature of what is “harmful” to minors.

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