Google Vows to Fight U.S. Justice Department Request for Search Records

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on January 20, 2006 - 2:54am.

Washington - In a move being watched by Internet privacy advocates, search engine giant Google said that it plans to "vigorously" fight the Bush administration's demand to reveal what million of its users have been looking up on the Internet, several media outlets reported on Friday. The Justice Department is asking to see a random sampling of one million searches conducted on Google over a one-week period as part of its effort to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), designed to protect minors from sexually explicit material. The measure was previously struck down by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds. Though several of Google's competitors, including Yahoo, America Online and MSN, already have complied with the request, Google told CNN that the government's demand for information "overreaches." "We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously," Nicole Wong, an associate general counsel for Google, wrote in a statement to the network. The government filed a motion on Wednesday demanding that Google turn over the records.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/13669361.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html
http://tinyurl.com/b6lv6 (Washington Post)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-google20jan20,0,202330.story
http://tinyurl.com/86odo (CNET)
http://tinyurl.com/7fc72 (Reuters)