Saturday, January 21, 2006

Our civil liberties at stake

our views

There is a troubling trend showing up in America on issues of security and civil liberties.

More and more U.S. citizens are indicating a willingness to give up their rights in exchange for promises of more security, and, more worrisome, many are willing to leave it up to the government to decide.

Recent polls show that, overall, Americans rate security higher than civil liberties, and a significant minority — 42 percent and above depending on the poll — say it's OK for the government to spy on citizens without court approval.

These chilling numbers show a sad lack of understanding of our Constitution, which was written to protect the rights of the people from government excesses, and a poor knowledge of history — mainly, that every time a people have sacrificed freedom for security, the outcome has been less of both.

Now comes a case we hope will get the attention of Americans and perhaps change some attitudes.

In 1998, Congress passed the Child Online Protection Act, which had the noble objective of protecting children from pornography on the Internet and ridding it of child porn. In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law, saying among other things that it was too broad and violated the First Amendment.

But the court left the door open, allowing the government to either produce a narrower version of the law or go to court to prove it doesn't violate the First Amendment and is the only viable means to fight child pornography.

Rather than take the hint and produce a better law, the Justice Department decided to go the latter route, and as part of its case is contending that the law would be more effective than software filters — favored by privacy advocates — in protecting children. To bolster its case, the government subpoenaed the Web's major search engines for massive amounts of information about the content of users' online searches.

Of the major search engines, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have complied with the subpoenas, but the leading search engine, Google, has refused. On Wednesday, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to force Google, which processes more searches than the others combined, to turn over the records.

The government's subpoena, which has been scaled down, seeks records of all Google searches for an unspecified one-week period plus 1 million random Web addresses indexed in its database (the government originally wanted all the addresses).

Google officials say they will "vigorously" oppose providing the information on multiple grounds, including the possible violation of its privacy policy with users and the possibility that trade secrets could be revealed.

For those who don't know, Google gathers a good deal of information about its users. But its privacy policy states the data will not be divulged except in aggregate, and that no individual or personal information will be revealed except under a valid subpoena, warrant or court order. The company feels that the government's subpoena does not fall into that policy because it is not related to a specific case.

If the government succeeds in forcing Google to turn over these records, it would be a serious blow to privacy rights. What is to stop the government from then saying, "We want the personal information about the people who made these specific searches," and try to justify it as legitimate law enforcement?

What then is to prevent the government from demanding the personal information about everyone who ran a search for, say, "bomb making" or "airport security?"

Imagine the chilling effect if people have to worry about how they word an Internet search or what Web sites they visit.

Google is correct to fight this subpoena, and shame on the other companies for capitulating so easily. There is a lot more at stake here than just revealing some search results. At the top of the list is how much authority the government has to invade your private life as it conducts a fishing expedition.

Where, exactly, does the line get drawn? This is a good place to start.

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