Google claims victory over DoJ

By Steve Malone

Posted on 20 Mar 2006 at 13:12

As expected, a US Judge has ordered search engine Google to hand over a random 50,000 URLs in its database to the Department of Justice. However, Google managed to scale down the original request and Judge Wade has also ordered that any request by the Government to disclose the search queries of any users would be denied.

Originally the Department of Justice had demanded access to the company's search logs running into billions of URLs and two month's worth of search queries. Other search engines including those of Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL had already complied with the DoJ request. When Google refused, the Department requested a subpoena demanding that the search engine hand over the files.

The DoJ subpoena was made at the behest of the Bush administration anxious to resurrect the anti-pornography section of the Child Online Protection Act, which was struck down by the US Supreme Court as being too wide ranging and contrary to the Constitutional right to free speech. The Supreme Court suggested that the use of properly enforced filters would prevent children accessing pornography sites as effectively as an outright ban. The DoJ is now seeking to prove that the filters are insufficient.

According to Dr Philip B. Stark, a California Professor who is acting on behalf of the DoJ, over a quarter of Internet searches are for pornography.

The DoJ says it will take the query logs and take a random sample of around 1,000 Google queries for a one week period which will be run through the Google search engine. A human being will browse the top URLs returned by each search and categorise the content.

Google had argued that the original request was too burdensome for its engineers to carry out. However the judge says that the scaled down request along with the government offer to compensate Google for any costs incurred means that the company can no longer claim technical issues as a defence.

Writing in the Official Google Blog Nicole Wong, the company's Associate General Counsel said 'This is a clear victory for our users and for our company. We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring. What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies'.