Nice to see Google taking a stand on this, whereas other search engines have caved in without a fight.

If Google is forced to submit this data, then I expect we'll see a European Google being set up, just like Galieo is being rolled out to offer an alternative to US controlled GPS systems.

This particular article is a good counterexample of the effectiveness of evilornot.info . This article's google evilness factor is 47% while SEW's article on the same thing is 6%, proving the people rating these don't read the articles before they vote.

I don´t see how they will refuse to give data, they will collaborate with Bush.

Google searches+Gmail+Blogger and they have your brains.

Me must act like everything is public on the internet.

I not sure how this will play out.. there is not literal facts being cited to reveal the nature of the Request. If a Gov requests something, under the information act, we should be able to obtain a copy of the same. I trolled Both justice Dept and treasury dept , but could not find any kind of links for further fact checking..

Neither does Google have anything on their site to assure investors and users, this is strange ..

I wrote to both Google Press as well as Howard Mintz. Should anything come back from that I'll post it.

What's amazing is that this isn't a situation where Google has specific evidence that would be relevant to a case. It's not like they suspect John Smith of making porn available to children via Google and are asking to see John Smith's Google records. They're just trying to gather statistics about the web and are hoping to force Google to provide them. I don't think the government has any chance of winning this in court.

I posted an update in the original post.

Can't govs just polite ask for that report, not for raw data?

Can I just say "WTF?!", please?

As a child, I discovered porn ... in the woods.

Was that a bad thing?

More importantly, if a child discovers porn in the woods, is it still porn? Sorry, maybe being so flip wasn't approrpriate, but then I used to "buy" (steal actually) porn from the neighborhood quickiemart when the owner wasn't looking and I grew up OK. I'm not a sex pervert (well, only with my wife who is older than me) and I don't steal anymore, not since I learned to bribe somebody else to buy me the things I wanted but wasn't "old enough" to buy for myself, and I haven't had to do that in 20+ years. So I don't think my youthful indescretions destroyed me that much.

Fast is, there are already laws on the books for distributing porn/aclohol/tobacco to minors. Pursuing some company because some hacker 'tween managed to get by their security (which they have as they want people to pay for it anyhow) is just plain stupid and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

In some fantasy reality somewhere, children first learn about sex when their parents sit them down with them a couple of months before puberty sets in and give them a little talk about "the birds and the bees".

Ok, maybe for a tiny statistically insignificant number of people – this actually happpened. I'm just concerned that they all seem to have grown up and found jobs inside the justice deparment.

(Posted a second update to the post.)

After the US government has challenged Google and fails to receive the information they seek, expect to see a rapid and idiotic excuse from "eliminating child porn" to something that of "annihilating child pornography and their ring leaders whom violate or is outlawed by international (UN) laws..." or which may turn out worst and probably the excuse i believe they will change to is "protecting or expunging digital information that can be used to manufacture WMD's and that of connecting to anti-government groups..."

Google: Don't fall into temptation to Big Brother – you have a billion or more supporting groups out there that stand with you!

Philipp, wrt to 2nd update . DOJ does not have this motion online (anywhere) yet. How accurate is the source that you point too ??

But like in another forum someone said "At some point, the pervasiveness of the Internet is gonna collide with the protection of children. Screw privacy rights! " –

if its going to protect kids why not eh ??

Pd, the PDF I linked to is hosted on CNet's server, and was linked to from the ZDnet article. I hope it's the real deal.

This doesn't have anything to do with "child porn", or catching anyone in particular. It's a complicated legal issue having to do with whether censorware works or not, as related to legal standards in censorship.

By the way, I have a hilarious article on the argument the goverment used the last time this issue what before the Supreme Court:

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000553.html

SEW has a good discourse happening here

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=9701&page=1&pp=20

to bad its becoming political in nature :(- It sucks to be american!

Haha, what a joke. I want a list of all of the webpages in google's index.

Shame I'll be dead before I can finish going through them all.

Compwiz, what makes you think that this is just about p0rn ?? Its a little bit more and deeply embedded into the patriot act too .. rather the activate the patriot act, its easier and more community freindly to ask for data in "child p0rn" – less fuss and trumor.. but googles said no- so it now becomes a big deal. YAHOO, MSN, ASK and others ceeded information under these mandates. But googles Knows, its even bigger.. correct ?? why ???? they comprimise their whole pripreitory system...no- they dont gave a hoot about user privacy.... they will sell you and me for a dime if push comes to shove... check the circuits.. do something which is infringeable, they will handover data with no problem...thats the law.. but on a whim ?? I beg to differ...

this is an issue.. and what lurks underneath this all will be more interesting as it unfolds...

EFF's (Electronic Frontier Foundation's)Kurt Opsahl argued the case in a podcast ..good listening

http://dw.com.com/redir?destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fi%2Ei%2Ecom%2Ecom%2Fcnwk%2E1d%2Fav%2Fne%2Faudio%2F011906%5Fgoogle%5Ffeds%2Emp3&edId=3&siteId=3&oId=&ontId=&lop=news-EFF

I agree completely with everything /pd says this is the stupidest thing ive ever heard of it seems that "the people" have no say over what happens anymore and that bush is makeing himself a dictater i mean look around 80% of the people want this to end and find it violateing personal rights but do you see that makeing any diffrence at all?

Luckily this administration is so incompetent they will have no idea what to do with any of GOOGLES data, even if they should luck out (now with the likelyhood that a Justice Alito may be sitting on the Supreme Court when this case gets ajudicated it is very likely they will win it).

from http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060119/D8F81BBO3.html

"The Mountain View-based company told The San Jose Mercury News that it opposes releasing the information because it would violate the privacy rights of its users and would reveal company trade secrets."

May I just wonder which trade secret this is violating? So far we only seemed to have cared about privacy rights. I'd be interested to see what trade secret this is violating. Let me just take a guess; a highly sophisticated "database of intention" to understand the mass and highly valuable statistical profiles of individual users. Basically tools to understand people from a macroscopical scale as well as from a microscopical one.

Alex, trade secrets are trade secrets :)-

Given the URLS and search term, DOJ can harverst a lot of information!! both pstream and downstream.. I dont trust the DOJ one bit

This fits somehow:

"We are stepping up our efforts to educate the American people," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said about Bush's trip to the NSA, based at Fort Meade in Maryland.

from: CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/20/bush.domesticspying.ap/index.html

The post topic "Bush Wants...." is a lame attempt to politicize the situation vis-a-vis the left's aversion to the Bush administration. What is more relevant is that other major competitors have cooperated in this request. The Google mantra of "Do No Evil" is too squishy to be a real policy. Google's leadership ability in this issue is nascent. If Larry or Sergey had young children they'd perhaps realize that Internet porn is a plague and the government request is in that context. The actual nature of the request needs to be read closely, rather than the posting of knee-jerk anti-Bush rhetoric.

A quote from MSNBC illustrates the muddled thinking on this topic-

"Search is a window into people's personalities," says Kurt Opsahl, an Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney. "They should be able to take advantage of the Internet without worrying about Big Brother looking over their shoulders."

If our civil liberties provides equal protection for child pornographers to prey on our children, then the Google mantra of "Do No Evil" is only about positioning as the cool new world-altering company, just not the actual "doing" of it. Positioning and execution are quite different things....and Google's response on this issue is telling. The market spoke today on it- Google shares down approx. 9%.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10965524/site/newsweek/

Dan writes:
> ... equal protection for child pornographers ...

What has this case to do with child pornographers?

Philipp,

Many press outlets have reported this in the context of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which was the scenario that Yahoo and MSN cooperated with the request(s). Despite Seth Finkelstein's well-written posts, there is precendent in this case within the guidelines of COPA-
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-01-26-n76.html

The NY Times perspective on this is here-
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html?ex=1138510800&en=8cc40f0cfe778a6a&ei=5070

I'd suggest that the "Do No Evil" ethos I've criticized as out-moded is further proven by the recent Google censorship cooperation in China. When there is a giant profit motive, the other cheek is turned, i.e., China. Google can "protect" potential COPA-defined pornographers, yet sell-out via censorship hundreds of millions of Chinese ? Perhaps Google revenues would be impacted via cooperation with the COPA requests... ??? I'd love to see the DNE ethos more deeply articulated, particularly in the sense that Google's broad reach bumps up against many legal, ethical, and censorship issues.