the DoJ takes one in the elbow.

[aamusedinatx]

This from my copy of "Good Morning Silicon Valley"

Should the Government wish to revisit this issue, the Court strongly urges it to figure out what the hell it's doing

Turns out Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL acceded to the government's request for their search records a bit too readily (see "Thankfully, we weren't bound by a 'Do no evil' clause in our company charter"). As Google showed us, it was possible to legally and semi-successfully stand against the Department of Justice's worrisome demands for search data. Late Friday afternoon a federal court ruled that Google must comply with the DOJ's request for information about its search index, but only after that request was reduced to 50,000 URLs from one million, its time span narrowed to one week from two months, and its demand for specific search queries removed entirely. In the end, it seemed U.S. District Court Judge James Ware found the DOJ's argument that it needed the data for its defense of the Child Online Pornography Act a bit ... lacking (see "What if we promise not to show the records to Karl Rove?").

"The Government's disclosure of its plans for the sample of URLs is incomplete," Ware wrote in his ruling. "The actual methodology disclosed in the Government's papers as to the search index sample is, in its entirety, as follows: 'A human being will browse a random sample of 5,000-10,000 URLs from Google's index and categorize those sites by content' and from this information, the Government intends to 'estimate . . . the aggregate properties of the websites that search engines have indexed.' The Government's disclosure only describes its methodology for a study to categorize the URLs in Google's search index, and does not disclose a study regarding the effectiveness of filtering software. Absent any explanation of how the 'aggregate properties' of material on the Internet is germane to the underlying litigation, the Government's disclosure as to its planned categorization study is not particularly helpful in determining whether the sample of Google's search index sought is reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence in the underlying litigation." In a word, this exercise is clearly a fishing expedition, and not even a particularly well planned one.

Ware went on to question the government’s claim that the search queries at issue here wouldn’t yield any personally identifiable information. “While a user’s search query reading ‘(user name) Stanford Glee Club’ may not raise serious privacy concerns, a user’s search for ‘(user name) third trimester abortion san jose’ may raise certain privacy issues as yet unaddressed by the parties” in the case," he wrote. “This concern, combined with the prevalence of Internet searches for sexually explicit material -- generally not information that anyone wishes to reveal publicly -- gives this court pause as to whether the search queries themselves may constitute potentially sensitive information."

Journal with links found Here.


Mind you I do not have a problem with cracking down on child pornography/ers at all. But as with anything in law, you have to limit the scope to pertain to the issue at hand. Current attitudes that the DoJ or anyone else in DC can do anything it takes to do anything they want has gone beyond ridiculous and in fact hampers them in doing the job they should be doing because they get caught in these round-robin debates in court rather than getting their finger out and actually DOING THEIR JOB. You'd think a bunch of attorneys who presumably have passed the BAR exam and--unlike Harriet Meyers--has kept their membership up--would have a better understanding about what is likely to fly in front of a Judge. It gives me a bit of a giggle that the DoJ seems to assume that because they are the DoJ they OWN the judiciary. That is often NOT the case.