Google searched
Topics: Civil Liberties
26 Jan 2006
From: Ervan Darnell
Last week, the federal government subpoenaed Google for all search records for an arbitrary week. [1]
Even though this was called a subpoena, it's functioning like a warrant, in the sense that it is being used to investigate possible crimes and not to produce evidence for a trial. That brings me directly:
"and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
There is no probable cause, no affirmation of anything, and it's certainly not specific. This would all be bad enough were it for investigating terrorism (to which I give some latitude). But it's not. It's for a domestic law, child molestation. I don't mean to make light of child molestation, but it is an ordinary crime for which the Bill of Rights is surely applicable. But wait, it's worse than that. This subpoena is not to investigate a crime per se, but only to seek data to support a law the administration wants. That is, they are doing a dragnet search merely for a political purpose. But wait, it's worse than that. This particular law, COPA, is so bad that the court issued an injunction against even enforcing it until its constitutionality can be heard. So, the administration is using a wildly unconstitutional search in an effort to defend an probably unconstitutional law.
The precedent is worse still. While Gonzalez points out that this search returns no individual information, the mechanism being argued for admits of no such limit. Just like the domestic spying without FISA court approval, the first use seems less burdensome, but the standard being set admits of no such limit.
The Dems are AWOL too. Best I know as of this date, the only proposal is to limit the storage of personal data for a certain period of time. That does nothing to stop overly broad searches. It just means the government will have to do the searches more often and harvest the data before Google deletes it. And, it hurts the consumer potentially to the extent that keeping that data is useful (e.g. gmail keeps email 'forever').
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html?ex=1138510800&en=8cc40f0cfe778a6a&ei=5070
====================================================
Ervan Darnell
ervan@kelvinist.com http://www.kelvinist.com
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