I have been following Google's recent quarrel with the Bush Administration and had been holding off on commenting it until I read this. Google's shares are now down 8.5% because of this fight between the ADD Bush Administration (are we fighting terrorists, porn or the Minute Men this week?) and Google over the Child Online Protection Act. This last ditch attempt by President Clinton to salvage one tenth of a percent of credibility on sexual morality issues is quite possibly one of the most useless pieces of legislation passed in recent years against pornography.

There is something undeniably fishy about the Bush Administration going after these records at Google, AOL, Yahoo and MSN because it would be very easy for them to pay a contractor to write a Perl script that sends tens of thousands of requests to each search engine for various terms, processes the result pages and stores statistical information about what it found in a database for the attorneys to use in court. I have seen commentary online that suggests that this information could not be used successfully in prosecutions against users who searched for illegal content given the legal status of the data handed over to the DoJ. However, in light of the Bush Administration's use of the NSA to spy outside of normal channels, who knows what their real motives are given that all the information they need to prove their case could be easily acquired and demonstrated in a court without spending any real money or hassling Google or others.

In the mean time we need to be asking a more important question and that is just why the hell are these search engines keeping track of all of this information? It would be one thing to build an initial profile and then track the user to make slight upgrades to it to flesh it out, based on new search interests. However, it is quite another thing for these companies to be truly logging everything that their users search for, especially in a way that may last for years. Anyone who has read up on Google's infrastructure knows that they have enough disk space available to them to log every search that their users perform for probably a decade or more as of right now. Even if they were going through a hundred terabytes a month, they'd probably have no problem keeping up with the volumes of information that the government might want to have access to.

For now, let's give Bush the benefit of the doubt that all he really wants to do is inconvenience these search companies by making them provide the data for his case at their expense. Seriously, that's probably all this particular case is about. What it should teach all of us is that search companies can and will track everything we do and they should be regarded like fire: useful when it serves you, dangerous when it works against you. In other words, be careful of what you search for out of curiosity because it may become part of a profile that is gathered on you that one day falls into the hands of business or government officials with the power to take actions that could affect your future. Even if Google wins its lawsuit, there is nothing stopping Google from changing course in the future and handing over information as readily as Yahoo, AOL or MSN.