Fishing in Cyberspace
The New York Times | Editorial
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.