The Feds also tapped into Instant messenges that AOL secretly logged (yup, all of them) some years back. Not sure if that was Clinton era or not. The big question is whether the public will freak when they find out Google has the capacity to map EVERYTHING you do...for everyone.
Hope you only use google. http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/19/_doj_search_requests.html Well duh it's divorced of user data. How many people login to google/yahoo/msn to search the web? What an utterly useless request - no way that data could possibly be misused...
Do have any idea how many people would go to jail if Big Brother looked at their stash of porno on their PCs? You might say that they are pervos and deserve it. But one picture of one boob from a seventeen year old girl is all that it would take to get your *ss sent to the federal pen.
I still remember quite a while ago, there was one thread about Yahoo! giving up some online activity information of a user to Chinese government, which helped the goverment arrest that person. Some posters had some heavy critics on Yahoo! and Chinese government. I don't see them too upset in this thread. Of course, this is in the name of p*rn probe, it's all good. Back then, the reason Chinese government gave Yahoo! was national securety, which would be an even stronger case in today's norm, I guess.
According to the article, they are not looking for child p*rnography (pictures of minors), they are trying to see how often people under the age of 18 look at p*rnography. Getting a random sample of searches doesn't show anything, unless you can tie it to the person that made the search. If the search data is truly divorced of user data, it would be useless to the government. If user data is passed along, to me, that would be a huge privacy issue. EDIT: Google is now formally being sued: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=arCWSKEPoJaE
True - This is strictly a search question related to age - pretty much impossible. How do you discern the age of a particular user in a standard household? But yes - after thinking about it - you could tie the searches to timestamped IPs. I seriously doubt the request is as benign as it is being made out to be. Quell my shock.
This leads me to believe that the federal government is not being truthful wrt their current real intentions. I suspect that they want to find the top kiddie p*rn sites first and then go after the people who go there via their logged IP from google .
exactly. i dont see how this is nearly impossible one bit. its the same way that RIAA went after downloaders. get IP and then track the IP to the user.
I'm pretty sure many of the same people who oppose Yahoo helping the Chinese government administer its brand of justice also oppose the Bush administration snooping around Google's records ....the invocation of a general issue of "national security" sets off alarm bells for me - both when teh US government uses it (illegal spying by the NSA) and also when the Chinese government uses it.
That's a very good point. Though, it is possible they want data to make an argument that our brief period of internet-p*rn-lockdown didn't have a chilling effect on p*rn consumption. This is assuming they have a data-set already from that period to compare the new data to. But, that'd be a losing argument anyway, so I'm not too convinced on that.
I did not support Chinese government collecting data on that guy from Yahoo! At the time, my point was it's unfair to blame on Yahoo!, because they were in no position to argue whether they believe the guy is innocent, coz they had to comply with local laws. ....the invocation of a general issue of "national security" sets off alarm bells for me - both when teh US government uses it (illegal spying by the NSA) and also when the Chinese government uses it. That is excellent point. Freedom was never lost totally overnight in history. It happened in little steps, with all kinds of excuses and urgent circumstances. But it's normally too late, when everyone realizes it.
