March 14, 2006
A federal judge on Tuesday said that he is going to order Google to turn a portion of its Internet records to the U.S. Justice Department, said he is probably going to protect Google's data that is specifically relating to search requests that could reveal some of its secrets.
The U.S. District Judge James Ware communicated to the Justice Department it will get a part of the information they sought from Google in response to the government's desire to reinstate a law to protect children from online pornography.
The judge did stress that there was concern over the Justice Department's demand for a random sample of the search requests that consumers entered into Google's search engine.
He said that the last thing he wanted to do was for the perception to be created that Internet search engines and online databases are potentially tools to be used for government surveillance. He was more open to Web sites that were randomly indexed by the company.
The judge plans on issuing a ruling swiftly.
This case marks the first time that Google has faced the Justice Department in court over the government subpoena that was issued almost seven months ago. Originally the Justice Department wanted literally billions of Web addresses and search requests. The purpose was that the government believes they have a study that will prove that the current filtering software is not good enough to prevent children from viewing sexually explicit material.
Attorney for the Justice Department Joel McElvain told the judge that now the government will accept a random sample of 50,000 Web site addresses which are currently indexed by Google and another 5,000 random search request texts.
According to McElvain only 10,000 of the Web sites and 1,000 of the search engine requests will be used in a study involving a Pennsylvania case that is centered around the law that was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case is due to be heard on Oct. 23 of 2006.
Google is in somewhat of a hard position here as their competitors were able to hand over some search engine information to the Justice Department without compromising their users privacy. They don't want to look like they are in the position of supporting child pornography. At least I hope they don't.
