Talk Radio News Service: News, Politics, Media

By Ellen Ratner
Uncle Sam vs. Google

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Letter to the governor of Pennsylvania by the Pennsylvania Assembly, Nov. 11, 1755, attributed to Benjamin Franklin.

Once again, I find myself writing about issues that transcend partisanship and that go directly to the heart of our shared Americanism – what this word means and why this generation and those of our ancestors valued it so highly that they died by the collective millions to preserve it for themselves and bequeath it to those rarely mentioned in our own time – our "posterity."

The challenges to our liberties posed by our technologies and the government's attempt to limit the first by exploiting the second often unite the left and the right. This week, an issue arose that perfectly highlights how this process works.

This week Attorney General Alberto Gonzales petitioned a federal court to enforce a White House subpoena that would require Web-searcher Google to provide, for one week (which week hasn't been specified), queries involving search words that might have been used by those trying to access child porn sites. Moreover, the government demanded that Google produce 1 million Web addresses. Google has this information because in an effort to attract advertisers, it retains a history of both the searchers and the searched for long periods of time. Civil libertarians of both parties and all persuasions are alarmed at this development.

This effort has international implications. One British blogger, who attempted to investigate a local sex offender by "Googling" the offender's name and the school wherein the acts took place, now notes ruefully that, "That's me – done for."

The scourge of child pornography, in which innocent children and emotionally sick consumers are exploited by heinous criminals of the worst sort, is, next to Osama bin Laden, probably the least popular cause in America. Who could possibly object to using whatever means the government has to discover and punish the perpetrators of these crimes, and possibly rescue the very children who are exploited? In this sense, the government's position is beguiling – soothing even.

After all, certainly no law-abiding American has anything to hide. No decent person of goodwill would withhold any means necessary to stop the epidemic of child pornography. If the police came to my door and persuaded me that a search of my house was necessary to prevent a major crime, I would welcome them inside, fix them a cup of coffee, and assist with the search, warrant or no warrant.

And therein lays an awful trap. If Google is compelled to yield on this issue, in the future there will be other issues – for the most revealing "trips" we moderns take are usually done from the comfort of one's office, through the keyboard, on the screen and into the Internet. In complete innocence, and as is our right as native-born Americans, we use the Internet for information, to learn, to see for ourselves. This can lead to some pretty unsavory things.

I have sometimes gone to the most disgusting racist websites for information. For the same reason, I have visited the websites of terrorists who wish us harm; to websites of governments with abysmal human-rights records; I have sometimes tapped in the wrong Web address only to face the ugliest pornographic images. Once I needed some text from Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf" and located it on the Web. Does any of this make me a racist, a war criminal, a pornographer, or a Nazi? I don't think so. And I don't think my experience is much different from most of my Internet-savvy readers.

It is only short steps from investigating child pornography to terrorists, to other types of criminal activities, to tax returns, to politically unpopular points of view, to other, non-criminal personal matters which some future government might conclude is helpful in some way. Two things should be understood – governments will always "do what they have to do" to increase security; private corporations will always "do what they must" to increase advertising revenues, which in Google's case means retaining these data records for long periods of time.

Given the interests of government and corporations, I will make two recommendations. The first is that by law, Google must be compelled to disclose to users what its data retention policies are. If users decline, so be it; if enough users decline, then Google and its competitors will change these policies in the interests of civil liberties. The second is that the types of data stored and the period that it may be stored should likewise be limited. This is not anti-government or anti-corporation. It is pro-citizen.

It also reminds me of the profound and farseeing wisdom of so many of the early figures in our country's history. President Andrew Jackson, in his farewell address of March 4, 1837, implored Americans that "you must remember, my fellow citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing." Wherever old Andy Jackson is today, he is, as he was, truly "wired.