Police State Of The Union

Queens Chronicle
Feb. 04, 2006

Since 9/11, Americans have accepted some loss of privacy in the name of fighting terrorism. Our bags are checked at subway entrances, trucks inspected on the bridges and we submit to full-body pat-downs at the airport. Many of us even supported the Patriot Act, which significantly increased the government’s ability to pry into our private lives. A lot of this made sense at the time.

However, news last month that the government asked Internet companies like Google to hand over data on customers’ search habits is deeply troubling, coming as it does on the heels of revelations that the Bush administration was secretly spying on the American people. Both developments raise the larger question of how much is enough: At what point has the government gone too far?

In the latest case, the Justice Department subpoenaed Internet providers for a list of all Web searches in a one-week period. The attorney general ostensibly wants the data to figure out how people find pornography on the Internet, and intends to use this information to prepare a defense of a law that penalizes Web sites that allow minors to view adult content.

Under pressure from the government, Yahoo!, Microsoft and America Online complied with this request; only Google is resisting—as it should. Google’s lawyers say the government’s request is overly broad, and that complying would reveal “trade secrets”: who visits its site, what they’re looking for and how they use its free search results and ads.

The government insists that the information it wants cannot be used to identify individuals. Yahoo! et al agreed. Google’s critics say it cares more about public perception, pointing out that the company routinely turns over personal information in civil cases such as divorce, libel and fraud. But Google says that the records the attorney general wants could be used, in theory, to identify individuals and that this subpoena is too far-reaching. Compliance would set a bad precedent, and the government will want more next time.

Even if customer privacy is only an afterthought for Google, it is not hard to see how the search records, once in government hands, could be put to other uses. If the Justice Department found records of searches related to terrorism, it could, under the Patriot Act, request further information and data, including Internet addresses, which it could use to identify whoever performed the searches. In other words, if something related to terrorism showed up in the searches, the government would have the right to use that information—and request more—for purposes other than fighting pornography.

The Bush administration has left itself open to this kind of suspicion. Given last month’s revelations that it bent the Constitution and the definition of terrorism to spy on nearly anyone—without a subpoena—one can only imagine the snooping field day the government would have with Google’s information.

The Google subpoena also gives ammunition to critics who say the president could care less about the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches. What started as taking off our shoes at airports and having our library records examined by the FBI—arguably justified by the clear and present danger of terrorism—has turned into eavesdropping on our private phone calls and monitoring how we spend our time on the Internet.

Ironically, this is all happening while we are fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to export the freedoms in our Constitution, while at home we are rolling them back.

Instead, we should be leading by example. The time has come for Congress to do just that. As it debates renewal of expiring sections of the Patriot Act, it must do so with an eye toward limiting the Bush administration’s police state tactics.

Portions of the act, such as allowing the FBI and CIA to share terrorism information, make sense. Others, such as letting government agents look at our library records, are an affront to our values and should be discarded.