Concerning: Government Investigations Into Web Search Data

Compliance with government sponsored investigations into personal online search data is a complicated invasion of privacy. Questions involving user privacy and business operations within the online environment could eventually result in the creation of questionable behaviour by legal and public authorities, where before such an investigation, privacy within the Internet would have been considered a normal “way of life” for Internet users.

One fact that seriously hinders such an investigation is that the Internet is widely used as a communication method internationally, and sifting through search files randomly from an ISP would involve perhaps thousands or millions of international users, and thus violate their rights to remain free from search investigations without prior notification from the searcher, especially if the searcher is a government representative, within the Internet environment. Because many ISP’s operate internationally, obtaining such information may also involve legal problems internationally, and may violate international and national laws outside of our own country (USA).

Another hindrance to such an investigation is the inavailability of protected or non-protected search information within a networked environment; Aware of memory limits within a networked LAN, one can accurately say that existing RAM memory in ANY environment, personal and/or networked, and memory size limits within those environments make keeping such search data difficult if not impossible. Also there exists the possible fact that such search data is not kept in any memory file whatsoever within an ISP environment.

Perhaps a government involved in such investigations could look to the established privacy rights of citizens first and foremost, and also to already existing laws pertaining to unlawful search and seizure that may ultimately apply to any such investigation. This is not meant as an “obstructionist” statement, but as a carefully worded one intended to bring attention to possibly entangling legal conflicts and law enforcement actions, those involving already existing rights to privacy and privacy laws, and the possible future “policing” of the online environment.

In an attempt to rollout a Citywide Wireless Internet plan (TechConnect) two major approaches being considered by San Francisco which may significantly encroach on the public’s privacy. The two options are a for-profit solution which will finance the solution by monetizing the public’s privacy or grants from Homeland Security. This occurs in the context of elected officials and city administrators patting themselves on the back for what the voters approved (2004) in a watch law ordinance that makes Patriot Act requests difficult for the Federal government to pursue in San Francisco.

The targeted advertising solution (google and others) would track all the email and surfing habits of any user. This information could be used as in Gmail and Amazon to send specific advertising. It is of course , also available for National Security Letters and other legal methods which would not be presented within the legal context of San Francisco – avoiding the Watch Law. While networks can be created that do not track a user’s private information (no server logs, etc) that is not a method being promoted publicaly by vendors like Google and in fact is partly the reason the Justice Department and Google are now fighting over production of user’s search records – Google can’t say they just don’t have the information. While there are questions about Privacy in the RFP, they were specifically written as Open Ended rather than as Minimal Standards. Public Advocates and Organizations like ACLU, EFF.org and EPIC.org have all written and some have spoken about their concerns with this approach Before the RFP was created and released – yet no changes were made. Also DTIS has the ability to waive any RFP requirements in the contract negotiation process anyhow.

The other funding concept that is being quietly discussed as a mechanism for the San Francisco Municipal Wireless solution is Homeland Security Grants – the calendar image below is from the city official Chris Vein who is in charge of the RFP process which requires bid submittals by 2006/2/21 – See Below

Washington Post: 2006-01-19 Fed Grants (Homeland Security) for Surveillance Cameras for Small Towns .. this seems related to Municipal Wireless funding efforts as well in San Francisco

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/18/AR2006011802324.html

The Homeland Security funding option: “Motorola’s proposal suggests that the city pitch the project as a public safety issue, and capitalize on grants from government organizations such as the Department of Homeland Security. They suggest that the network would help law enforcement by enabling the SFPD to put wireless cameras across the city cheaply, and that the signal from a particular camera could be routed wirelessly to officers in their cars as they approached the scene.” (thanks to http://www.JacksonWest.com for summary)

Combined brief ACLU, EFF.org and Epic.org
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004078.php

SF Watch Law Re Patriot Act
http://www.sfgov.org/site/uploadedfiles/bdsupvrs/about/watch_law_program.pdf

Jackson West summary of TechConnect RFI/C submittals (the step before the current RFP process)
http://gigaom.com/2005/10/18/politics-of-san-francisco-wifi-project/

Chris Vein DTIS Acting Director’s calendar showing a meeting planned with Motorola (obtained through a Public Record’s request) image Bob Siemmens/Motorola TechConnect – Homeland Security 925-218-4213

At some point during their young lives virtually all children are intensely curious about porn and quite resourseful in finding it.

Teaching your children some common sense about the porn they will inevitably find somewhere is far more important than trying to block it from their view. How is it that parents cannot recall their own childhood experiences with porn? Why can’t they impart some wisdom to their children instead of attempting the impossible task of blocking porn from their kids eyes?

Oh yeah I forgot–talking about sex with your children is too embarrassing, better to pretend it doesn’t exist.

1) Hypocrisy – were Google to put at risk the success of its Chinese operations for the sake of the principle of freedom of speech and individual rights, then while I still wouldn’t agree with their stance on the Administration’s request, I would certainly respect them for having principles they’re willing to stand by. Regardless of my own opinion on the Patriot act and the correct balance of U.S. citizen rights vs. need to fight everything from pedophilia to terrorism, I do understand that there are different opinions. That said, however, Google has shown itself hypocritical in this instance. Why? Because at the same time they are willing to rebuff the Bush administration’s request to access search data to ferret out pedophilia, they gave in to Chinese govt demands to censure their SERPs. That, my friends, is hypocrisy with a capital ‘H’.

2) Profound disrespect for the United States – it’s worth pointing out that over 99% of the world’s SERPs are being served, ultimately, by U.S.-based search engines, and there are reasons for that. In this blessed country we are free to pursue crazy business ideas, we are free to access any information we want to access, and we are free to do so within the best set of intellectual property protection laws the world has ever seen. Just as importantly, we are free to pursue grand business schemes such as ‘organizing the world’s information’ because our laissez-faire financial system allows investment dollars to freely flow to bright minds and ideas with no concern for history, tenure, age, ethnicity, sexual preference or political persuasion; in a word, we live in the truest meritocracy ever conceived.

Our liberal meritocracy, whose individual rights form the basis for the social contract, however, only exists because Americans have been willing to die for it. From the war of independence to WWII, Vietnam and now Iraq, our fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, sisters and daughters have rightly understood the American ideal of liberty as worth defending at all costs. For very good reasons as well, our social contract has been strong and beneficial enough over these last 230 years to facilitate acknowledgement en masse of periodic (albeit temporary) needs for federal gov’t to suspect some individual rights in order to further the common good. Examples:

1. Military drafts – WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam wars all necessitated military drafts. Whether or not all Americans agreed with all wars is immaterial. The majority, however, do agree on one thing – we have an elected gov’t who we empower to make decisions in times of war, decisions which public opinion must necessarily *not* be factored into.

2. Internment of Japanese citizens & nationals – it’s easy in retrospect to say that 99.99% (perhaps even 100%) of interred Japanese were as loyal as the rest of America, but the perceived threat to America after Pearl Harbor was such that most Americans gladly supported internment.

3. Wiretapping – a federal anti-crime tactic nearly since the days of Alexander Graham Bell, wiretapping is the phone analog to Bush’s request for search data, and it has been universally accepted by the vast majority of law-abiding Americans.

With these historical precedents in mind, I find Google profoundly disrespectful of their obligations to participate in the social contract developed here in the U.S. over the last 230 years and defended with millions of lives, *especially* in the context of one arena where Republicans and Democrats would appear to agree – that pedophilia is abhorrent and a crime nearly as horrible as murder.

Argue with Bush’s policy’s if you will, but bring more to the table in defending Google’s actions than thinly-veiled distaste for the man personally and disagreement with his foreign policy. Moreover, I think everyone needs to think about what their feelings on this personally abstract topic would be if:

a)their child was molested by someone they met on the internet. Please don’t tell me you would simply blame your NetNanny provider.

b)their spouse was killed an ebola attack, subsequent to which a computer was found in an Al Qaeda safehouse in Pakistan which had a history of 30 Google searches on the topic of widescale aerosol diffusion of viruses.

-Shorebreak