My recent 2006 prognostications post had a bullet point for privacy – I expected privacy to erode.

Long story short, the Feds (Bush administration) have asked Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL for search information to help its case to protect minors from porn.

Google has resisted; here are some thoughts this whole situation has engendered in me:

• If the actual intent of this effort is to protect kids from porn, well, the very fact that the government is getting involved here dooms said process. See the CAN-SPAN act. And the Supreme Court cannot even define “obscene” beyond “I know it when I see it.” So exactly what are we attempting to defend our children against? This is a serious question.
• While most of the request from the government seems benign, the “random X web sites you have indexed” does seem to trample on trade secrets and so on. So – for this reason alone – Google has (to me) a good push-back point (from a PR standpoint; I don’t know the law).
• OK, the judicial branch can issue subpoenas – agreed. Can they subpoena search engines for this? Where is the “probable cause”? Search engines don’t seem tied to COPA, but….
• Google resisted; others didn’t. If Google had not pushed back, we’d not be discussing same. What other “requests” etc HAVE happened and we don’t know about because there was no push back?
• Google is pushing back, I think, on this request so there is not a precedent. Today, search terms. Tomorrow, who searched [x]??
• WHY did other engines just fork over the info? Jeremy Zawodny – a Yahoo! employee (and mySql god) has finally written about his company’s complicity with all this. He politely spanks his company, while giving (quietly) Google kudos. That sorta sums up all of this (to me). Read whateveryawant into that.

Again, welcome back George Orwell…