Searching for the Elephant

January 20, 2006

Searching for the Elephant
The Justice Department is searching for an elephant. It has issued subpoenas to companies running search engines on the Internet. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL submitted a week’s worth of millions of all sorts of queries by all sorts of people. They claim they did not betray anyone’s privacy. Google did not and is fighting the subpoena. It feels that people’s privacy will eventually be shredded if it submitted to the subpoena. And what do you suppose is the elephant?

Charles Miller of the Justice Department said that the government is looking for information that would help it restore an anti-pornography law that was struck down by the Supreme Court. The elephant is pornography.

It all started with the Patriot Act, a law that would help us locate spies and terrorists. To accomplish this, it was felt that law enforcement people should be allowed to use all means possible to snoop on anyone. What better device for snooping was ever invented than the Internet search engine? With one little subpoena officials obtained millions of requests that indicated how people think, what their habits are, what they desire, who they contact - and lots more. Through search engines, they could search for any elephant.

Why stop at pornography? Search engines could be used to ferret out little tidbits with which to attack critics of the administration, dissidents of the Iraq war or just plain Democrats. In this case the elephant would be a donkey.

That's the way it is today. But nothing lasts forever. Sooner or later, the Democrats will get into power. Then they will use search engines against THEIR enemies. Then the elephant will be the elephant.

Three cheers for Google. I hope they keep resisting. The search engine should be reserved for the daily nitty-gritty searches of everyday life, not for finding elephants.

Posted by Paul Siegel at January 20, 2006 04:51 PM