Sunday, January 22, 2006
Go Google!
First, I’d like to say that I believe that all pedophiles deserve to be castrated with rusty knives. That being said, the government is overreaching with its attempt to get Google’s search records.
Let’s make one thing clear-this is not a criminal investigation. If it was, the government could get a search warrant. No, this is a case of the government wanting Google to do its research for it. The government wants Google to hand over a random sample of a million URLs from its directory, and the text of each search string from a one week period. The government wants this information, not to build a criminal case, but to defend COPA, a law that, in the words of the EFF, “requires those who publish non-obscene, constitutionally protected sexual material online to take difficult and expensive steps to prevent access by minors, steps that would chill publishers of sexual material as well as the adults who want to access such material anonymously.” The government is also using fears of child pornography to justify its actions.
COPA is bad law. In the case of kiddie porn, that is already illegal, no matter how it’s published. The government does not need more power in this area. In the case of kids looking at “regular” porn, it is the parent’s job to make sure their kids don’t see web sites they don’t want them to see, not the government’s. Parents need to install filtering software on their computers if they don’t want their kids looking on certain websites; they should not ask the government to childproof the Internet. What happened to personal responsibility?
Even putting aside concerns about COPA, if the government wants this information so badly, it should do its own research. The Google directory is publicly available, let the government take its own sampling. Let the government perform its own (presumably) innocuous searches and see how much and what kind of porn comes up.
NOTE: The idea to search for "amature golf" came from a segment on this I saw this morning on Fox News.
Let’s make one thing clear-this is not a criminal investigation. If it was, the government could get a search warrant. No, this is a case of the government wanting Google to do its research for it. The government wants Google to hand over a random sample of a million URLs from its directory, and the text of each search string from a one week period. The government wants this information, not to build a criminal case, but to defend COPA, a law that, in the words of the EFF, “requires those who publish non-obscene, constitutionally protected sexual material online to take difficult and expensive steps to prevent access by minors, steps that would chill publishers of sexual material as well as the adults who want to access such material anonymously.” The government is also using fears of child pornography to justify its actions.
COPA is bad law. In the case of kiddie porn, that is already illegal, no matter how it’s published. The government does not need more power in this area. In the case of kids looking at “regular” porn, it is the parent’s job to make sure their kids don’t see web sites they don’t want them to see, not the government’s. Parents need to install filtering software on their computers if they don’t want their kids looking on certain websites; they should not ask the government to childproof the Internet. What happened to personal responsibility?
Even putting aside concerns about COPA, if the government wants this information so badly, it should do its own research. The Google directory is publicly available, let the government take its own sampling. Let the government perform its own (presumably) innocuous searches and see how much and what kind of porn comes up.
NOTE: The idea to search for "amature golf" came from a segment on this I saw this morning on Fox News.
