I’m not sure what’s more troubling — the fact that the U.S. government wanted to get its hands on the Internet search results of millions of its citizens, or that some of the leading search firms were so quick to provide the data.
Privacy — or the lack of it — on the Internet came screaming to the front burner this week on the news that Google Inc. was the only one of four major U.S. search engines to refuse a Justice Department subpoena to provide information on its users’ search results.
Not that Google has always been the white knight. Like Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp., Google has previously responded to government requests — in China — to censor or turn over its data.
Rather than tracking down and jailing dissidents, as the Chinese government did with information provided by Yahoo, the subpoena by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is part of an effort to revive a 1998 law designed to protect children from seeing or being exploited by online pornography.
