Search engine loses major court battle to Feds

By Drew Stephan
Collegian Staff
March 22, 2006

A federal judge ruled that the popular Internet search engine Google has to turn over some of its Internet search data to the U.S. Department of Justice in an ongoing Department effort to prevent access to pornography.

However, Judge James Ware denied a request from the Justice Department for Google to hand over a list of people’s search requests. Google lawyer Nicole Wong said that his denial “sent a clear message about privacy.”

“What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies,” she said.

The information to be handed over includes about 50,000 web addresses, or URLs, which the Department plans on using for statistical study in defending the constitutionality of its anti-pornography laws. They are seeking to defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which was blocked by the Supreme Court because of legal challenges on how it is enforced.

“This concern, combined with the prevalence of Internet searches for sexually explicit material, gives this court pause as to whether the search queries themselves may constitute potentially sensitive information,” Judge Ware said in his ruling.

Initially the Department had requested that Google hand over a list of terms entered into the search engine in a single unspecified week, possibly millions or even billions of queries. It also requested a million randomly selected web addresses from the Google databases.

The Department said that the request would not violate personal privacy laws and that Google’s method of ranking and organizing web material would be especially useful to its study. The main purpose of collecting the data is to show how easy it is for people to stumble over pornography when searching for other material on the web.

Since the advent of the Internet and the improvement of searching methods, law enforcement agencies in the United States and Europe have been able to successfully use information in prosecution cases. However, new laws have been established that limit the scope of the government agents in their attempts to find and track criminals.

The search engine had said that it would not comply with the request because it would invade users’ privacy and could compromise trade secrets. It said that any sample of data from its engine or databases could be used indirectly to identify users, and that if they complied, it would set a dangerous precedent for the government’s reach on the Internet.

Danny Sullivan, net consultant and founder of Search Engine Watch, said that his fear was that it would be a concrete model of how much power law enforcement agencies have and that in the future, they could conceivably request any data they deemed important. He also said that in this case, however, the data would be largely “innocuous” and would have little to link it to individuals.

After a large scale outcry from Internet search engines and users, the Department reduced its request to 50,000 URLs and roughly 5,000 search terms. They also issued information requests to Google competitors Yahoo, AOL and MSN, all of which complied with the subpoenas.

Yahoo, Google’s top competitor, said in a statement that it has complied “on a limited basis and did not provide any personally identifiable information.” In a similar statement, Microsoft said that it has been working “closely with law enforcement officials worldwide to assist them when requested,” and that it was its “policy to respond to legal requests in a very responsive and timely manner in full compliance with applicable law.”

stephana1@lasalle.edu
Information gathered from www.LexisNexis.com