EU Referendum this morning has an excellent post, I’m well and truly Googled!!, that details the danger of governments collecting unlimited amounts of information:
We learn from a variety of sources, including The Telegraph that the US Justice Department is demanding from Google (and other search engine providers) data about every search conducted on its site during a one-week period.
This will include records about the behaviour of millions of people around the world who use internet search engine, the Justice Department claiming the information is vital for its attempt to restore online child protection laws struck down by the US Supreme Court.
What could be nobler than government protecting children from the scourge of child pornography? Richard North's argument is that too many innocent people can too easily be caught up in such "sweeps" (akin to the "sweeps" the police have done in drug neighborhoods where they pick up everyone on the street at 3AM for questioning, or the road blocks set up for DUI checks.) As data mining techniques improve, the temptation to use such information for an incrementally increasing level of inquiry will almost certainly prove irresistible for the government, always for the best of reasons. There are obvious connections here to the NSA surveillance program and the outcry raised, primarily from the left, over the threat to civil liberties.
So, how do we square the circle between protecting our country and protecting our civil liberties?
As a first approximation, I would suggest that this case presents an ideal opportunity for determining where to draw the line. Despite the horrors of child pornography, it represents a danger that is several orders of magnitude less than terrorism, and in my opinion does not reach the level of concern that would justify such action as Google turning over all their records. Child porn is heinous but is not a national security concern.
In this case, I think Google, Yahoo, et al, have done the right thing by not cooperating with the US government in turning over such information. Of course, this makes their cooperation with the Chinese government that much more odious.
The people who cannot appreciate the difference between using such data mining techniques (which, by the way, all of our major corporations do all the time to determine what kinds of books you like, and what kinds of music you listen to, etc) in defense of national security versus for law enforcement do not have anything worth while to add to the discussion. If they can present a cogent argument that our civil liberties are more at risk from the government than from terrorists (a successful attack on the scale of 9/11 will provoke much more draconian measures than are being discussed at this point) then they should do so; however, just to claim that any attempts to use secret methods to find out what our enemies are up to are dangerous, is nonsensical and deeply irrational.
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