| US web users roundly condemn the Chinese government for forcing Google to censor its search results in China, while at the same time Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez continues to demand that Google turn over the search parameters of millions of Google users to the Bush administration in an attempt to prevent web users from seeing certain sites. |
| Several search engine companies have agreed to eliminate from search results in China articles that are considered problematic by the government there. They use the excuse that they must abide by local laws and customs in order to do business there. This sort of cooperation between American business and corrupt regimes has enabled government suppression and exploitation in foreign countries for generations.
Meanwhile, it's important to remember that this whole initiative to obtain search data from the major search engines by the Bush administration is not to deter terrorism. Instead, their aim is to prove that internet pornography is popular so that they can begin to limit its availability to the general public (under the guise of "protecting the children'). Incidentally, every search engine except Google has apparently complied with the Bush administrations request for data. How long before the US government begins to apply pressure to search engines to limit search results in America? The Justice Department went to court last week to try to force Google, by far the world's largest Internet search engine, to turn over an entire week's worth of searches. The move, which Google is fighting, has alarmed its users, enraged privacy advocates, changed some people's Internet search habits and set off a debate about how much privacy one can expect on the Web. It means a user must quickly and often at considerable expense find a lawyer and try to persuade a court to quash the subpoena. But the law often offers very limited protection for personal information held by third parties. That approach no longer makes sense, said Daniel J. Solove, a law professor at George Washington University. "In the information age," he said, "so much of our information is in the hands of third parties." Yahoo, for instance, provided information that helped China send a journalist there to prison for 10 years on charges of leaking state secrets to a foreign Web site. [S]aid Susan P. Crawford, a specialist in Internet law at the Cardozo Law School. Even if the Justice Department is not seeking private information now, she said, "the next subpoena could ask for that kind of data." Source: "In Case About Google's Secrets, Yours Are Safe" By ADAM LIPTAK - NY Times - January 26, 2006 |
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