Citizens concerned about free speech and its shy cousin privacy should be saddened by the Bush administration’s victory in its massive finishing expedition through queries submitted to search engines. The government, as alert BMG readers will recall, demanded a week of search queries, later reduced to 5,000, and a random list of a million Web addresses from Google, later reduced to 50,000, a few weeks ago, allegedly to help its argument about how best to implement a 1998 anti-pornography law. Tellingly, the state never specified the exact connection between this information and the argument it wanted to make. Probably because it didn’t have one. (“The Government does not even provide [this] rudimentary level of general detail as to what it intends to do with the sample of URLs,” the judge wrote, just before he agreed to give them “the benefit of the doubt”). AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft gave investigators the information they wanted without a peep. Google fought, and largely lost. Look for more vague government information requests in the future — a list of searches involving a specific list of political opponents might be particularly useful for Mr. Rove if Bush’s poll numbers continue to sag.
