DoJ strikes back against Google

THE Department of Justice has ordered Google to turn over data to help the Bush administration to re-instate a failed child pornography law.

Google had rejected a request from the DoJ to hand over the search results of millions of Americans to the US government, and now it seems that the Justice Department has replied on Friday with a court filing.

In an 18 page brief the DoJ argued that because the information provided would not identify or be traceable to specific users, privacy rights would not be violated.

Previously Google called the Bush administration's request for data on Web searches "so uninformed as to be nonsensical". It said that it would result in breaching the privacy of its millions of users and would take a week of engineer time to complete.

The Bush administration wants the data to revive an online child protection law that the Supreme Court has blocked. It wants to show that Internet filters are not strong enough to prevent children from viewing pornography.

More here. µ