Privacy? What Privacy?

Howard Minz reports in the Mercury News that the Bush Administration is seeking search records from Google, nominally to find out who's looking for dirty pictures.

The move is part of a government effort to revive an Internet child protection law struck down two years ago by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law was meant to punish online pornography sites that make their content accessible to minors. The government contends it needs the Google data to determine how often pornography shows up in online searches.

In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. The Mountain View-based search and advertising giant opposes releasing the information on a variety of grounds, saying it would violate the privacy rights of its users and reveal company trade secrets, according to court documents.

To those who say, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," here's a search engine for you. Just don't forget to use the terrorist:true or terrorist:false tags correctly.
[Technorati tags: google | privacy | patriot search]