Google Vows to Fight Government Subpoena

Posted on January 27, 2006

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google Inc. has vowed to fight for as long as it takes against the government subpoena that is asking the search engine company to turn over millions of search records in connection with its effort to reinstate an internet porn law that was struck down by the Supreme Court. Google is not a party to the porn lawsuit, nor has it been accused of any wrongdoing, which makes the subpoena even more troubling to privacy advocates.

"It's our obligation to use the law to the farthest possible means to protect our users' privacy," Brin said in an interview yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "It's just a legal and ethical principle."
Mountain View, California-based Google, the world's most-used Internet search engine, is fighting a Justice Department lawsuit after rejecting a request for samples of search queries from consumers. The government said it needed the data as part of an effort to counter challenges to Internet pornography legislation. "I don't think we like the precedent of it, and so we're fighting it," Brin, 32, said. "I think we're right."
Google is defending data that Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have turned over, at least in part. The suit, filed Jan. 18 in federal court in San Jose, California, exacerbated concerns about consumer privacy and the Internet and helped prompt the biggest-ever one-day decline in Google's shares. The Justice Department is seeking one week's worth of Web searches and 1 million addresses in Google's database.

Many writers and journalists are especially outraged over the subpoena and worry that it is merely the first step in the government's plans to censor information and track users' habits. Journalists who cover the Middle East, for example, have worried that they might be tracked for "visiting terrorist websites" which is a necessity of their jobs.

We can only imagine what kind of "suspicious" searches Tom Clancy must do every single day.