The Justice Department has denied requesting anything from Google that could threaten the privacy of the search-engine’s users, as the company recently contended.
Concerns by Google Inc. that a Bush administration demand to examine millions of its users’ Internet search requests would violate privacy rights are unwarranted, the Justice Department said in a court filing.
The 18-page brief filed recently argues that because the information provided would not identify or be traceable to specific users, privacy rights would not be violated.
But by trying to block the government’s efforts to review a week’s worth of search terms, Google is holding up efforts to protect children from pornography, according to a brief filed by the Justice Department.
The department believes the information will help revive an online child protection law that has been blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court. By showing the wide variety of Web sites that people find through search engines, the government hopes to prove Internet filters are not strong enough to prevent children from viewing pornography and other inappropriate material online.
The information the Justice Department requested is to be used in a study to help the Bush administration defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), an Internet pornography law. The government is seeking to highlight flaws in Web filtering technology during a trial this fall.
Google maintains that complying with the government’s request would mean disclosing important trade secrets, take up too many of the company’s resources to produce and harm its reputation with users.
The U.S. Justice Department was responding to Google’s legal filing earlier this month, in which the search giant argued that the government’s request for 1 million pages from Google’s index, as well as copies of a week’s worth of search terms, would harm the company in numerous ways.
The Justice Department submitted a declaration by Philip B. Stark, a researcher who rejected the privacy concerns, noting that the government specifically requested that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.
The study does not involve examining the queries in more than a cursory way. It involves running a random sample of the queries through the Google search engine and categorizing the results, Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said.
The government seeks this information only to perform a study, in the aggregate, of trends in the Internet. No individual user of Google, or of any other search engine, need fear that his or her personal identifying information will be disclosed.
The issue has raised red flags among privacy-watchdog groups, which fear that Web sites could be used to spy on Americans or limit their right to free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging COPA, arguing that Web sites cannot realistically comply with it and that the law violates the right to freedom of speech mandated by the First Amendment.
Google also failed to link the information the government requested to "any supposed trade secrets," the Justice Department said in its brief. As for the costs of complying with the Justice Department’s subpoena, the government argued that Google could "comply with the subpoena with relative ease."
The Justice Department noted that Google’s competitors–American Online, Yahoo and MSN–gathered the information without much trouble when those companies voluntarily complied with similar requests.
Lastly, the government hung its argument on precedent, saying that the right of the government to obtain information needed to present its case outweighed any of Google’s arguments.
The government has a legitimate need for the disclosure of data that is uniquely in Google’s possession, the Justice Department said in its filing. The balance certainly weighs in favor of disclosure of any alleged trade secrets.
Mountain View, California-based Google has staunchly resisted the Justice Department since receiving a subpoena last summer, setting the stage for the current legal battle.
On Feb. 17, Google issued a strongly worded declaration to the court, criticizing prosecutors for a "cavalier attitude" and questioning their understanding of search-engine technology.
The Justice Department requested that Google be given 21 days in which to comply with the court’s order. A hearing is scheduled before U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose March 13.
Google representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.