“Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”

This question was posed by one of my two personal heroes almost 150 years ago.  We are still wrestling with it, as the Google-Justice Department faceoff so aptly demonstrates.

I’m not going to comment on the case.  It’s not that I don’t have an opinion.  I do.  It’s that by now I assume you already have one, too.  (If our ISP hadn’t crapped out on us on Friday, forcing us back into the Pen-and-Ink Age, maybe I would have commented by now.  But it’s too late for that.)

What I’d like to do is provide a few links to some interesting stuff:

• John Battelle (read the posts starting from January 18th) places the issue in the context of what he had already written about the Database of Intentions in his book, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.
• Search Engine Watch has an overview of the issues that is being continually updated.
• Danny Sullivan says the issue isn’t about personal privacy but about trust and gives “trust points” (scale of 1 to 10) to AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo.  Guess who won?
• Gary Price provides links to PDF copies of the actual court documents, along with commentary.

Postscript, 3:55 pm: I should add that there are worse instances of search engines “collaborating” with governments.  I’m thinking of MSN and Yahoo caving in to the Chinese government.  In the case of Yahoo, a journalist was sent to prison for 10 years.  They rationalized by saying, “Just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations and customs of the country in which they are based.”

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
on January 23, 2006 - 12:49 pm

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