Pavlov Scope

I am not sure why the government keeps punching themselves in the face with this stuff, but do they really need to have access to millions of “random” searches on Google? The “company line” is that they are looking for evidence of pedestrian searches that return pornographic results (mistakenly) as a way of finding porn sites that aren’t offering strict entrance controls.

In light of all the bad press recently for our government’s operational ailments, it seems like strange timing to start worrying about protecting children from seeing pornography. I could be wrong, and maybe they are trying to nab some negligent people for real, but casting such a wide net for such a non-offense begs too many questions in my mind. After all, they are looking for evidence to bring BACK a law that was overturned a couple years ago.

Google’s core mission is the freedom of the world’s information (well, other than to make some huge money ;-) and to that end they have made more progress than anyone in history since the invention of moveable type. I agree with Lawrence Lessig’s core philosophy that the natural state of information is freedom (that is to say, without significant barriers), just as the natural state of humans is to be free, but it is commendable and somewhat comforting to see this organization (with access to so much information about us) push back against this kind of, in my opinion, government overreaching into all of our lives. Whether you are one of the good ones or one of the bad ones, I still believe that we do not deserve to be treated with almost despotic disregard. I don’t care if it is terrorism, kids looking at porn, or a meteor hurtling toward Earth – our government has shown us that it almost never “knows best,” especially at the higher levels of political office (regardless of what political flavor you may favor).

One solace that we might take from this report: Perhaps those concerned about Big Brother already having this information are misguided (after all, they are asking many search engines for their logs). Like many government projects (although not all…), it would seem that the collection of all data traversing the Internet is a task that not even the hyper-powerful American government can do.

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