by the Way . . .

You probably misunderstand where the government stands on this privacy thing. Government is politics, and the President leads through the popularity of his issues. A major concern is that there is no real grass roots support for privacy rights. So Mr. Bush has obviously asked the Justice Department to prod the populace a little, arouse them so to speak. The first effort was under the Patriot Act, that business about listening to your phone calls. Ashcroft is smart, and knew that was just going to lead to a bunch of dead ends, unless, of course, the local pizza parlor is harboring terrorists. But the cover story was too good. People appreciate going after terrorists, and you can always pursue your affair on a public phone. So the prod met with a big public yawn.

It is hoped that this pornography thing will get better results. To understand the cover story you need a little background. In 1998 Congress moved to protect our teenagers from smutty stuff with the Child Online Protection Act. That has criminal penalties if your web site has anything deemed (at that time, by Ashcroft) harmful to minors. But the Supreme Court stopped enforcement and told the trial court to see if maybe Internet filtering technology might take care of the hang-up. To argue that, the government felt it should first find out if anyone was really looking at online porn. Obviously, if there is a lot of looking, some must be by dirty minded teenagers, and so the filtering doesn't work. This is just a summary, of course, and we can't use any bad words here, so don't worry about each little step in the logic.

So to see if anyone was looking the government pried all the records of user searches out of Google et al. and has this statistics professor from Berkeley (that should tell you something) pouring over it "to gain crucial insight into information on the Internet." I wouldn't know, but I have heard that there is, in fact, nasty pictures out there. Google argued that such a search might "chill" guys who were over 17 from looking, which is OK under the Act, but that didn't wash. So now the government has billions of search destinations identified, but for now is not checking who did the search. However, that would seem to be necessary to see if those blackguards were over 17 or not.

So there you have it. The government calculates that there should be a significant surge of objections from guys who are not interested themselves, but will certainly defend the rights of others to see constitutionally protected sex stuff. This should get some steam behind the movement.