[IP] Editorial for IP: Fishing in Cyberspace (NY Times, 21 Jan 06)
Begin forwarded message:
From: GLIGOR1@xxxxxxx
Date: January 21, 2006 2:42:22 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Editorial for IP: Fishing in Cyberspace (NY Times, 21 Jan 06)
January 21, 2006
Editorial
Fishing in Cyberspace
Enough is never enough, not when the government believes that it can
invade your privacy without repercussions. The Justice Department
wants a federal judge to force Google to turn over millions of
private Internet searches. Google is rightly fighting the demand, but
the government says America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online
service, have already complied with similar requests.
This is not about national security. The Justice Department is making
this baldfaced grab to try to prop up an online pornography law that
has been blocked once by the Supreme Court. And it's not the first
time we've seen this sort of behavior. The government has zealously
protected the Patriot Act's power to examine library records. It
sought the private medical histories of a selected group of women,
saying it needed the information to defend the Partial-Birth Abortion
Ban Act in the federal courts.
The furor is still raging over President Bush's decision to permit
spying on Americans without warrants. And the government now wants
what could be billions of search terms entered into Google's Web
pages and possibly a million Web-site addresses to go along with them.
Protecting minors from the nastier material on the Internet is a
valid goal; the courts have asked the government to test whether
technologies for filtering out the bad stuff are effective. And the
government hasn't asked for users' personal data this time around.
What's frightening is that the Justice Department is trying once
again to dredge up information first and answer questions later, if
at all. Had Google not resisted the government's attempt to seize
records, would the public have ever found about the request?
The battle raises the question of how much of our personal
information companies should be allowed to hold onto in the first
place. Without much thought, Internet users have handed over vast
quantities of private information to corporations. Many people don't
realize that some innocuously named "cookies" in personal computers
allow companies to track visits to various Web sites.
Internet users permit their e-mail to be read by people and machines
in ways they would never tolerate for their old-fashioned mail. And
much of that information is now collected and stored by companies
like Google. When pressed on privacy issues, Google - whose informal
motto is "Don't be evil" - says it can be trusted with this
information. But profiling consumers' behavior is potentially
profitable for companies. And once catalogued, information can be
abused by the government as well. Either way, the individual citizen
loses.
Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
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