A Little Fearmongering is Good for the Soul, I Guess.

It appears that Google is taking a stand against the Justice Department in refusing to provide search result information to aid with child porn investigations. I’m not entirely sure where I fall on the issue, though Jonah Goldberg sums up the kerfuffle pretty well:

The Department of Justice is in a lawsuit with the ACLU over the Child Online Protection Act, which is designed to help prevent kids from being exposed to online porn. The law ran afoul of the First Amendment, according to a lower court, and the Supreme Court asked for additional information pending its final decision on the matter. The Department of Justice asked Google, as well as MSN, Yahoo!, and Time Warner (AOL’s parent), to provide data on their search engines from a one-week period. (The Associated Press scarily refers to the request as a “White House subpoena,” as if the White House could actually issue subpoenas.) No personal information was asked for and none has been given. Everyone but Google complied, because there’s really no reason not to. Google, however, sees itself in a very idealistic light and has decided to stand on principle against the government, prompting huzzahs from all the predictable sources.

The Google flap doesn’t strike me as all that serious. The Justice Department needs information for a court case – probably to build some sort of statistical analysis for a one week period so it can say that on a given week some percentage of the searches on the big search engines were for child porn. No biggie. In fact, I’m rather surprised they didn’t have that information before they went to court. There’s no indication that they’re getting anything beyond a list of search results. No ISP information. No other user information. Nothing nefarious.

That has not stopped the panic-mongering, though. The New York Times ran out an article this morning that is supposed to be, I guess, an evenhanded look at the debate through the eyes of the “person on the street”. What it is, though, is a ridiculous assortment of ignorance and borderline hysteria from people who, judging from their professions, should be just a little smarter. Here’s the first example.

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a “rent boy.”

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy – a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. “I told him I’d Googled ‘rent boy,’ just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night,” she said.

Exactly. Because the Navy having rounded up all the people who are trying to murder us, have decided that our next threat is unemployed 45-year old women Googling up a little boy toy action. The Sixth Fleet is on standby as we speak. SEAL teams are ready to deploy. Copies of American Gigolo are being ripped from the shelves.

I can only hope that what wasn’t quoted was her boyfriend telling her “Don’t be such a reactionary jackass, dear”. I kind of doubt that, though.

Here’s the very next person the Times chose as representative of “concerned Americans”.

Jim Kowats, 34, a television producer who lives in Washington, has been growing increasingly concerned about the government’s data collection efforts. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I just feel like it’s one step away from … what’s the next step?” Mr. Kowats said. “The government’s going to start looking into all this other stuff.”

Yep. You read that right. He’s concerned about something. He has NO FREAKING IDEA what it is, but he’s concerned nontheless. About “the next step”…what?…forced confinement? Labor camps for internet perverts? A roundup of documentary filmmakers? Being forced to view a hundred MySpace profiles written and designed by 17-year olds (this is the worst possible punishment. Have you been to MySpace recently? It looks like the Web Site Bad Design and Rebus-Typing All World Team is having a competition over there). But Kowats has a sort-of legitimate concern.

Until last year, Mr. Kowats worked at the Discovery Channel, and a few years ago, in the course of putting together a documentary on circumcision, he and his colleagues were doing much of the research online. “When you’re researching something like that and you look up the word ‘circumcision,’ you’re going to end up with all kinds of pictures of naked children,” he said. “And that can be misconstrued.”

Not very easily it can’t. The thing is that when you do a Google search, as you all well know, you don’t get a bunch of images unless you’re actually searching for images. So it’s not like you just type in “circumcision” and up pops a bunch of prepubescent wangs. You have to do a click or two more to get the kiddie junk. Besides, what sort of internet troglodyte, trying to get information for a documentary does such a broad and nonspecific search? Surely this guy knows that he’s going to get a whole lot of junk using such an ill-defined search. But perhaps that’s the point. He really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Let’s move on, because the Times really seemed to pick some winners today. How about an expert?

“It’s scary to think that it may just be a matter of time before Googling will invite an F.B.I. agent to tap your phone or interrogate you,” Ms. Farrell said.

It is, but we’re not there yet, are we? Or are we? Well, the article seems to be thin on that particular fact. Can Google get our identities from our searches? You’d think that in an article solely about that fear, they might drop in a little bit of fact. Well, they would unless the article isn’t much concerned about the fact and more concerned about drubbing up some fear.

Thankfully, we get one lone voice of reason among the “man on the street” folks.

But Josh Cohen, a financial adviser in Chicago, identifies more closely with a subset of Internet users who see the loss of at least some privacy as the price they pay for being on the Web. Mr. Cohen, 34, said he was willing to accept that tradeoff in the pursuit of national security.

“We as U.S. citizens have got to start making concessions,” he said. “In order for the government to catch people that prey on children, or fight the war on terror, they are going to need the help of the search engines.”

Mr. Cohen said he doubted there would be much compromising of his individual privacy because the amount of data collected by the government was so voluminous. “My rationale tells me that with close to 300 million people in the U.S., and about 45 to 50 percent of households having Internet access, that I don’t need to be too concerned with my search engine behavior,” he said.

What’s this? A guy who can apparently think past his blinding panic and do math at the same time? How in the world did he get past the editor? Oh…he’s on page two of the article. And aside from one other person quoted right after him, they’re the only two folks giving us anything close to a voice of reason. Just him. Don’t back in his warmth too much, though because the article wastes no time finding yet another Chicken Little. Note what their point is, though. It’s not that the government isn’t getting the information, or that they can’t get the information, but that they could but just don’t have enough time to get to you, the average innocent American. See, it’s not that the government has no interest in you. It’s just that they don’t have enough jackbooted thugs to sort through the records.

Remember that question I asked earlier about the future potential of the FBI to get your info from Google? The Times eventually gets around to addressing it right at the end of the article.

While it does not directly assert that surrendering the data would expose personal information, it has told the government that “one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept.”

Oh, so the queries can’t actually reveal the information that has everyone so scared? These fears – so lavishly explored on the front page of the Times website – exist only in the realm of the theoretical?

Well, never mind then.

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Category: General, Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush