Talk About Lazy…

Instead of just, you know, doing research, the Justice Department is trying to subpoaena from Google records "which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period" to use as evidence in defense of the Child Online Protection Act. (Hat tip.)

Comments

[Johnny Clarke]

Eh, creeping Fascism. Besides, whenever the government tries to create massive databases they get smacked around by all those weirdo privacy groups.

[Stephen Macklin]

At the COPA

COPA Cabana

It's looking a lot like Havana.

[Stretch]

I'm not sure how effective this would be in actually determining how often people are exposed to pornography. I mean, you can type any word into google and eventually down the list porn sites will start cropping up. But nobody ever gets that far down the list. Does anyone even go to the third page, let alone the 103rd?

[April]

Stretch, depends on whether or not you're "feeling lucky."

[Larry A]

And if the government gets "1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period" what then? Have hundreds of government workers sort through all the records for six months or so? So the Justice Department can tell the court, "There's porn on the internet, and it can be found?"

Duh!

[kmw]

Just for the sake of conversation, how many of those search hits are on servers outside the US? That's probably not part of the scope of their research, but fact remains that porn is avaible in the world, and any new instance of the COPA won't cover other countries.

I'm not a pornographer so maybe I shouldn't care, but I'm really concerned about what this case means for the future. I'm sure people in Saudi Arabia have no problems getting porn online either, but does a person really want to live there?

[Pro Libertate]

******THREAD HIJACK ALERT******

The New Horizons mission to Pluto just launched. I looked out my window to see it, but there's a danged hotel in the way. Anyway, one year to get to Jupiter for a gravity assist, nine years to reach Pluto. Of course, with warp drive, it could've been there in 5 1/2 hours. Or less.

[Ed]

I added a well-known porn site title to the header of one of my sites and visits increased by 100X. Even though it says in the title that's it's not the porn site noted, people still click it. I check the referrals and most come from google searches for the porn site in question. I don't know if any of this is pertinent or legal, but if you want increased traffic, put a porn title in your keywords. I wonder how reason.com/hitandrun.notteentits would do?

[zero]

kmw:
Obviously if the sites are outside of the US they need to modify the COPA to mandate a National Firewall to keep the bad porn out.

[Stretch]

I added a well-known porn site title to the header of one of my sites and visits increased by 100X. Even though it says in the title that's it's not the porn site noted, people still click it. I check the referrals and most come from google searches for the porn site in question. I don't know if any of this is pertinent or legal, but if you want increased traffic, put a porn title in your keywords. I wonder how reason.com/hitandrun.notteentits would do?

Yes, but those hits come from people already looking for porn. I think the government is concerned with how many people, specifically children, are linked to porn when they're searching for other things. You know, like if you searched for "Reason" and got a link that said "Want a reasonable deal on hot teen sluts?".

Well, of course I do, but I believe that the hot teen slut market bubble is about to burst anyway.

[Stretch]

Obviously if the sites are outside of the US they need to modify the COPA to mandate a National Firewall to keep the bad porn out.

God dammit, we only want our kids to access good ol' American porn! I don't care how hot those Hungarians are, our children will just have to make due with our homegrown, corn-fed midwesterners.

[Jamie Kelly]

Oh fuck. Guess I'll have to switch to Ask Jeeves when I'm searching for hot young women dressed in diapers.

[Timothy]

God dammit, we only want our kids to access good ol' American porn! I don't care how hot those Hungarians are, our children will just have to make due with our homegrown, corn-fed midwesterners.

Nothing wrong with midwestern girls.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

I've heard that those midwest farmers' daughters really make you feel all right.

[Stretch]

Nothing wrong with midwestern girls.

Heh. I didn't mean to imply such. You know, it actually appears to be fairly difficult to find a site dedicate to hot midwestern girls. An opportunity perhaps?

[Innocent Child]

I was doing a paper on the space shuttle, and I typed in "Granny Tea-bagg'n" in a search engine.. boy.. did I get some weird hits!

[Innocent Child]

an' another time..

I was doing homework about global warming, an' I typed in "fist rapist" in the search engine..

EEEEEEEwwwwww! How did that get there?!

[Timothy]

Stretch: "Midwest Mandy" definitely not work safe, and that's all I'll say here as I am also at work.

[raymond]

I thought this was interesting:

Google keeps log files that record search terms used, Web sites visited and the Internet Protocol address and browser type of the computer for every single search conducted through its Web site. It also sets cookies that can be used to correlate repeat visits to the company's growing network of Web sites. (znet)

[happyjuggler0]

My God our government is dumb. Why do they need to get google to cooperate at all? Don't they know how to google for something? Can't they write a program and have it google all kinds of reasonable sounding queries, and see how far down the 500,000+ reuslts they get before they hit porn?

Oops, I forgot. The programmers are all blind now.

[Anon Y. Mouse]

If you write a script that repeatedly does Google searches, after some very large number of searches in a brief timespan, Google will block your IP addresses from using their search tool.

Then the neat part is spending the rest of the day explaining to your co-workers why they have to use a CAPTCHA script just to Google things.

[R C Dean]

Well, of course I do, but I believe that the hot teen slut market bubble is about to burst anyway.

No way. Demand for hot teen sluts is hard as a rock. It won't be going down any time soon.

[Sphynx]

As much as this kind of Gov. strip mining raises my hackles, I still get a laugh out of imagining the Terrabytes of data that could result from a week's worth of Google search results.

[Ruthless]

It's for the children.
But which is better for the children?
Cracking down on porn on the internet?
Killing more terrorists and their friends and families and children?
More money for government school teachers?

Seems to me "the children" is just a slippery slope.

Speaking of which, "Midwest Mandy," eh? Thanks Timothy. I'll be "switching gears" here shortly.

Oh yeah, another thing. This will have an effect on the stock price of Google, Yahoo, etc., similar to what Hillary's socialized medicine plan had on drug stocks.
(I well remember the Hillary effect. I used to be a stockbroker. I tried to persuade a class action law suit lawyer to put together a case against her. Would it be possible to sue the Justice Department?)

[crimethink]

Ruthless,

I can see how drug companies' profits were threatened by socialized medicine, but how will this buffoonery affect Google's stock? It's not like people are suddenly going to stop using search engines.

[Ruthless]

crimethink,
Surely you jest.
Recall everything happens "at the margin."

[mediageek]

I'd just like to point out, for the record, that I emailed this story to Nick this morning.

Boo-ya!

[methodman]

I just did my part to stack the deck.

If you see any headlines in the near future involving Dennis Hastert fucking horses, or Bill Frist fucking Denny Hastert, or Hillary Clinton cumshots, you know where they came from..

[Mad Scientist]

If I worked and Google and had to comply with this request, I'd be sure to print out all the results and send the 1,000,000 random web addresses and the frickin' weeks worth of searches to these lazy bozos on paper. How many monkeys and how many keyboards would they need to type all that data into their Justice Department computers? No formatting in nice columns either, just a raw data dump to paper. Fuck 'em.