Editorial for IP: Fishing in Cyberspace (NY Times, 21 Jan 06)

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: GLIGOR1 () aol com
Date: January 21, 2006 2:42:22 PM EST
To: dave () farber net
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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