SAN JOSE, CA – The Bush Administration and the US Department of Justice (DOJ), in an attempt to revive the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) – which has twice been struck down by the courts as unconstitutional – has subpoenaed Google Inc. to produce search records and other materials as part of the DOJ’s investigation.Google has thus far refused to comply with the subpoena, which was issued last year. The subpoena covers a wide range of materials from Google’s databases, including a request for 1 million “random” web addresses, and records of all Google searches for any one-week period, according to papers filed by DOJ lawyers in a San Jose federal court on Wednesday.
Representatives of Google said in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News that it opposes releasing the information, because it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets.
Nicole Wong, associate general counsel for Google, said the company intends to “vigorously” fight the government’s subpoena.
“Google is not a party to this lawsuit, and the demand for the information is overreaching,” Wong asserted.
Privacy advocates and public interest “watchdog” groups have grown increasingly concerned in recent years over the nature and amount of data collected by Google, worrying, among other things, that inappropriate access to information could not be prevented, and that the federal government could potentially tap into Google’s massive data pool to collect information on Google users that would be otherwise unavailable to them.
Although Google has repeatedly and publicly pledged to protect its users’ personal information, the company’s published privacy policy states that the company does comply with valid legal and governmental requests for information. The now mammoth-sized internet company also has no stated guidelines on how long it stores and maintains various types of data, leading some critics to warn that Google could retain data forever, given how inexpensive digital storage has become.
For its part, the DOJ claims it needs the Google data in order to ascertain how often pornography shows up in online searches. The government hopes to show that internet filtering software is less effective than credit card screens in reducing children’s access to pornography.
The 1998 version of COPA would have required online adult material to be kept behind password-protected areas that require some form of age verification to access – a credit card could be used as proof of age. Under COPA, violators could be fined up to $50,000, or even serve jail time.
In addition to ruling COPA unconstitutional in its first round of legal challenges, the high court also stated that technology solutions like filtering software and other parental control mechanisms would likely be more effective anyway; a position which was echoed by various Clinton Administration officials at the time.
The issue is now before a federal court in Pennsylvania, and the DOJ wants the data from Google to bolster its argument that the law is more effective than software in protecting children from porn.
It’s not clear at present how the DOJ (or Google themselves, for that matter) could determine which Google searches were performed by adults, and which were performed by children.
